THE BWKMAN
AUGUST 1930
FICTION OF THE EIGHTIES : by Forrest Reid
A COUNTERBLAST TO HUMANISM by Rebecca West
JOHN MASEFIELD: LAUREATE by Odell Shepard
- CREATORS AND THE COPYRIGHT - by Lyman Beecher Stowe
THE DUTTON CLUE MYSTERY FOR AUGUST
THE GREEN JADE HAND
By Harry Stephen Keeler
Harry Stephen Keeler clinches his reputa- tion as the most ingenious of mystery writ- ers with this thriller in which Chicago’s underworld and Chinatown are strangely linked by the disappearance of a priceless manuscript and the theft of a green jade hand. A pulse-raiser of the first rank! $2.00
Be your own detective and win a reward with
DUTTON PRIZE CLUE MYSTERIES
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWN- ING: LETTERS TO HER SISTER
Edited by Leonard Huxley
Previously unpublished letters of Mrs. Brown- ing that further reveal the charm of that un- usual woman. Hugh Walpole says, “This is a delightful book. We have in these pages the full portrait of an enchanting woman. Yes, the full portrait. It is quite astonishing that we should be given so much. Elizabeth Barrett is here in all the warmth of her marvellous heart.” Illustrated. $5.00
CALIBAN IN GRUB STREET By Ronald Knox
Imagine a combination of Chesterton and Max Beerbohm, paradox armed with wit and allied to logic and you have an index to Father Knox’s powers as a writer. With subtle dialectic and keen satire, as a champion of the faith, he con- founds the most famous of contemporary agnostics. A scintillating book. $2.50
A Variety of Dutton Books for a Variety of Tastes
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THE PATRIOT’S PROGRESS By Henry Williamson
One of the best-reviewed novels in America in recent months and one of the three best- sellers in England. “The reader feels, not that he has read a book, but that he has been through a profound and memorable experi- ence.” Edward Hope in the N. Y. Herald- Tribune, $2.50
MR. PIM By A. A. Milne
Enter the lovable, laughable Mr. Pim, the most popular of A. A. Milne’s grown-up characters, in a comedy of errors that will keep you entertained from his first ap- pearance to his passing by. An ideal book for light summer reading. $2.50
JENNY HEYSTEN’S CAREER
By Jo Van Ammers Kuller Author of “The Rebel Generation”, “The House of Joy’, etc. A searching novel of a woman’s soul by the famous Dutch novelist. All the world was Jenny Heysten’s stage— and everyone her supporting cast—until love refused to play a secondary part. What hap- pens when she confused her “réle life” with her real life is the theme of this uncom- promising story.
WATER AND GOLD By Lewis S. Palen
As told to him by CHartes G. HepLuND Charles Hedlund’s life was like a gust of wind. He was blown about the four corners of the globe by good fortune and bad from the time he was an orphan chimney sweep in Sweden to the days he spent before the mast on the seven seas, on the Gold Coast of Africa, and in the Boer war. You'll find his story as thrilling a true narrative of adven- ture as any sailor of fortune ever told. $3.00
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AUGUST, 1930 THE BOOKMAN VOL. LXXI; NO. 5
Contents for August
JOHN MASEFIELD: POET LAUREATE ODELL SHEPARD 477 The incongruity of the appointment of Masefield, who has held himself to be the poet of the common man, to the position of Verse-Maker by Special Appointment to the King has received wide comment. Mr. Shepard, whose definitive examination of Robert Bridges appeared in the April-May Bookman, points out in this companion article that Masefield’s work; far from being a direct and simple transcript from life, is bookish and often markedly deriva tive. Mr. Shepard, author of “The Joys of Forgetting” and “The Lore of the Unicorn”, is Goodwin Professor of English at Trinity Coilege, Hartford.
WHIPPOORWILL MAVIS CLARE BARNETT 454 A poem.
THE DECADE OF CONVICTIONS V. F. CALVERTON 486 Since 1914 American letters have gone through two periods; one of revolt and one of cynicism. With the thirties another attitude has arisen: we are at the beginning of a period of convictions. The humanists are concerned with self-reform; they are conservative. The radicals—whom Mr. Calverton repre- sents—are concerned with social reform; they are revolutionary. The Book- man presents this article because of its frank recognition that these opposing trends show themselves in literature, and at this time are drawing up for battle.
MINOR FICTION OF THE EIGHTIES FORREST REID 49I In the eighties the English novel was undergoing a profound change. It was no longer a medium for simple diversion, but had begun to show a tendency to use social, religious and emotional problems as its material. In this article, Forrest Reid, the well-known Irish novelist and critic, recalls some of the minor authors of that period who contributed with varying charm and compe- tence to the changing form.
THE MEANING OF ROUSSEAU ROBERT SHAFER 503 In writing his recent book “The Meaning of Rousseau”, Professor Ernest Hunter Wright had for his purpose the clarification of Rousseau’s real inten- tion. Mr. Shafer believes that Mr. Wright was unsuccessful, and gives his reasons for the verdict. Mr. Shafer is professor of literature in the graduate college of the University of Cincinnati, author of “Progress and Science” and “Christianity and Naturalism”, and a contributor to “Humanism and America”.
CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE
Contents Continued
A LAST LONDON LETTER REBECCA WEST A counterblast to humanism; with a reply by the Editor.
“THE LION AND THE LADY DANIEL” ANONYMOUS The wife of a novelist and dramatic critic tells of the disruption of all domestic peace which followed her husband’s desertion of criticizing plays and under-
taking to write one.
SHALL CREATORS OWN THEIR CREATIONS LYMAN BEECHER STOWE
Only Russia and Siam provide their creative workers with so little defence
against foreign exploitation as the United States. Mr. Stowe, who is secretary
of the Huntington Press, emphasizes the necessity of passing the Vestal Bill in December if our authors and artists are to be adequately protected.
Reviews and Departments
FICTION 541 FLEDGLING FICTION by Harry Hayden Clark, Alan Burton Clarke, by Guy Holt. Stirling Bowen, Esther Forbes, Leo Kennedy, Lynn Anderson, Louis Rich, Margaret Wal- lace, Myra M. Waterman, William Howell ’ oa ese Wells, Eudora Ramsay Richardson, Clarice THE BOOKMAN S MONTHLY SCORE Lorenz Aiken, George Dangerfield.
BIOGRAPHY 553
by Alan Reynolds Thompson, Margaret Wal- lace, Alan Burton Clarke, Grenville Vernon, Foster Rhea Dulles, Robert L. Roe, Frances Winwar, BON VOYAGE
NOTES ON NEW BOOKS
A VARIED SHELF 560
by Alan Burton Clarke, Hamlin Garland, Fos- SPECIAL EDITIONS ter Rhea Dulles, Louis Rich, Margaret Wal-
lace, George Dangerfield, Don C. Seitz, Rob-
ert L. Roe, Irving Astrachan, Robert S. ‘
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Between 2:30 a.m. (the death of the doctor's partner) and 11:45 p.m. (the birth of Mrs. Perkins’s baby) you join an old-fashioned physi- cian on his daily round of an English village. With him you explore the interior of many lives. For this novel is a page from the day-book of Doctor Serocold, whose pa-
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Science
THE MAKING OF CHEMISTRY éy Ben- jamin Harrow (joHN bay. $2.00)
Into a small volume, Mr. Harrow has com- pressed an account of the achievements of the world’s leading chemists through the ages. The ancients knew how to smelt ore, how to make dyes, how to utilize fermentation processes; they also knew how to make synthetic gems and how to cover—plate—one metal with another. But the first modern chemist was Paracelsus, who, like his predecessor, Roger Bacon, preached experimentation, but who was himself unable to experiment because of professorial prosecu- tions which drove him from city to city. The author begins with his career and skims through the activities of Boyle, Stahl, who was the origi- nator of the phlogiston theory, Priestley, Lavoi- sier, Mendeléeff, et al, down to the Curies, benefactors to the world through their discov- ery of radium and its applications. He discusses briefly the réle of chemistry in medicine and industry, and the outstanding contributors to the growth of the science.
EXPLORING FOR PLANTS by David Fair- child (MACMILLAN. $5.00)
Tue thrill of the hunt is not for the stalker of big game alone. In this unusually stimulating book, Dr. Fairchild reveals the excitement and satisfaction which attend a search for obscure, little-known plants and trees in remote corners of the world. His account of his party’s adven- turous travels through Europe, Africa and Asia discloses the fact that for many years he has been engaged in digging up fruits, vegetables and vegetation all over the globe, and trans- planting them in the United States. The pur- pose of the trip which Dr. Fairchild describes rather charmingly was to add to the garden and forest importations of the country such flora as might flourish on American soil. The iv
hunt did not prevent the members of his party from collecting an assortment of fascinating, fantastic facts which are woven into the narra- tive with skill. Many of the two hundred illus- trations picture these facts in a manner rivalling that of Mr. Ripley. The book is eloquent evi- dence of the fact that Dr. Fairchild has an eye for the bizarre and the beautiful, as well as for the bountiful, in nature.
HEAVEN AND EARTH dy Oswald Thomas (NorTON. $2.75)
For those who would renew their acquaintance with the facts which they once met in the sev- enth grade of their schooling, under the guise of general science, Heaven and Earth is as good as, if not better than, most of the books about the stars. It considers lucidly and with humor the relationship of the earth to its sun, the na- ture of the moon and the inhabitability of Mars; it explains the genesis and evolution of comets, planets, stars and “systems”; it is so up-to-the- minute that it includes mention of the recently discovered, still more recently named planet once threatened with the label of “Percival”. An unusually stimulating final chapter attempts to clarify the nature of the universe and the conception, basic to an understanding of the question, of Einstein’s fourth dimension.
YOURSELF, INC. by Adolph Elwyn (sren- TANO. $3.50)
Prorgssor Exwyn’s work invites comparison with Dr. Clendenning’s The Human Body. This latter volume discussed the same topics with which Professor Elwyn concerns himself, but brought to that discussion wit and urbanity. Yourself, Inc. is a popularized text treating of the body’s structure and functions. It employs that which, in poetry, is termed a conceit—a contra-Platonic comparison of the human body to human society. The connective and support- ing tissues are called the building trades, the
Write
A. H. BITTNER
General Introduction to Course—lInstructor— Pop- ular Fiction. Editor Ar gosy Weekly. Formerly with Adventure and Short Stories. Organizer of Frontier Stories. Instructor at New York University
EUGENE A. CLANCY
Instructor—Western Fic- tion. Author more than three hundred stories pub- lished in many magazines, some being dramatized _for movies. Has been with Top Notch and several other similar publications.
R. MARTINI Instructcr — Air Fiction. Associate Editor, War Birds, Sky Riders, Sub- marine Stories. Author of numerous stories, novels, and novelettes of various fictional types.
RONALD OLIPHANT
Instructor—Detective Fic- tion. Editor Chelsea House. Formerly Associate Editor Detective Story, the first all-detective magazine Author of more than forty published detective novels
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THE BOOKMAN ADVERTISER Vv
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— Eight Editor-Authors
ANTHONY M. RUD
Instructor — Adventure Fiction. Author of stories appearing in Saturday Eve- ning Post, and many others. Former editor Adventure.
A. A. WYN
Instructor—War Fiction. Executive Editor War Stories, War Novels, Navy Stories. Formerly editor of Modern Story. Has written over 100 stories, novel- ettes, and novels.
F. ORLIN TREMAINE Instructor — Confession Stories. Editor Miss 1930. Edited Smart Set. True Story during riods of great growth. Has written many popular stories pub- lished in magazines and in newspapers.
WANDA VUN KETTLER Instructor—Love Fiction. Editor Sweetheart Stories 1926 to 1929. Formerly newspaper feature writer and assistant editor Love Story. Has written more than 150 stories, articles and poems,
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circulatory system and its factors are transport workers and the eliminating mechanisms are garbage collectors and disposers. There is a chapter devoted to “The Regulation of Héme Activities” which are nothing else than our glands. Relieved of this handicapping quality, Professor Elwyn’s work would stand out as a lucid presentation of what everyone should know.
THE FIELDS AND METHODS OF KNOWLEDGE by Raymond F. Piper and Paul W. Ward (xnopr. $4.25)
Here is a volume, avowedly for the college man, into which many non-collegians may delve with profit. Its authors have assembled a prodigious assortment of facts pertaining to the physical and social sciences, to mathematics, to philos- ophy; they have outlined the tenets of scientific research and indicated the various steps in log- ical reasoning whereby scientific data may be interpreted. Their purpose is to aid the newly arrived college student to orient himself. The book suffers somewhat from its authors’ attempt to crowd in a little of everything, and from its rather professorial language. Nevertheless, it -is to be recommended.
AN HOUR OF PHYSICS by E. N. da C. An drade (.ipPINcoTT. $1.00)
Tuts new addition to the One Hour Series is interesting. Professor Andrade has not attempted to condense all physical science into one small volume; he has been content to say “Something About Heat and Energy”; “Something About Light and Radiation”; “Something About the Quantum Theory”; etc. As in his more extensive work, The Structure of the Atom, Professor An- drade has written authoritatively as well as lucidly; the hour spent with his little book is an hour well spent.
SHORT TALKS ON SCIENCE dy Edwin E. Slosson (cENTURY. $2.00)
Tuese “short talks” by the late Doctor Slosson are for the most part anecdotes, amusing odds and ends from all over the scientific field. Many of them were printed in Collier’s under the heading “Catching up with Science”. In this bound form they are ideal for any boy who has a scientific bent.
THE MATERIALS OF LIFE dy T. R. Par- sons (NORTON. $3.00)
Tue newest addition to the alarming number of “books for the layman” deals with the sci- ence of biochemistry “so that everybody shall be able to understand the materials of which living things are made . . . (in) such language as is used by all of us, no matter what our pre- vious training and experience”. The array of topics is an ambitious one. There are vitamins and calories, yeast and alcohol, gland secretions and muscular excretions, ultra-violet rays and radium. The structure and functions of the organs found in the human body are discussed briefly, with the emphasis placed on metab- olism. By far the most worth-while part of the book is the chapter on the biochemist and his struggle against disease.
THE ATOM by G. P. Thomson (Hort. $1.25)
In this book, one of the volumes in the excel- lent Home University Library, the author, who is professor of natural philosophy at the Uni- versity of Aberdeen, gives a concise definition of the Atomic Theory—the root idea of which appears to have been propounded by Democri- tus. The field covered in this interesting little history carries the reader to such far reaches of scientific exploration as certain ramifications of modern life insurance. The author calls to his aid, necessarily, the research and findings of such first-rank scientists as Dalton, Faraday, Millikan, Sir William Bragg, de Broglie, Ed- dington and scores of others.
BIO-DYNAMICS: THE BATTLE FOR YOUTH by Boris Sokoloff (covict-Fr1EvE. $3.00)
Dr. Soxotorr’s volume is refreshing because of its thoroughly workmanlike treatment of the rdle played by the endocrine glands in the de- termination of individual energy and healthful- ness. Dr. Sokoloff points out that senescence is attributable to autointoxication of the endocrine system, and that senility, which is nothing more than a disease, is avoidable. He maintains that science, through knowledge of the endocrine glands, will one day conserve life, not by extend- ing man’s three score years and ten, but by en- riching the middle years of life on which old age encroaches.
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Biography
KRUPP: A GREAT BUSINESS MAN SEEN THROUGH HIS LETTERS edited by Wii-
helm Berdrow (piav press. $5.00)
Krupp’s first letter, when at the age of fourteen he inherited his father’s failing business, was about steel. That sets the temper of this book. Taking any letter at random, one always finds him writing about steel. He did indeed talk with Bismarck and the Kaiser himself; it was about steel. Through some oversight the frontis- piece is not a steel engraving. Krupp must have had other interests to achieve the place he did, but this book gives one no reason to think so.
WHEN I WAS A GIRL dy Helen Ferris (MACMILLAN. $2.50)
Miss Ferris, who has an uncanny way of know- ing what girls like to read and what they find most interesting, has put the stories of five women, told by themselves, into this book. Er- nestine Schumann-Heink, Etsu Sugimoto, Mari: Curie, Janet Scudder and Jane Addams tell stories of their youth and struggles more fas- cinating than any fiction. Perhaps no girl under fourteen will be prepared to get the most from them, but after that age there is no reader who would not follow them with absorption.
PAGANINI OF GENOA Ody Lillian Day (MACAULAY. $3.50)
Tue celebrated virtuoso on the violin was also somewhat of a Don Juan and Miss Day in- vestigates the two sides of his career in this light but well-written biography. She has un- covered much fascinating material that evokes the early nineteenth century with all its garishness.
THE INFIDEL EMPEROR by Paul Wiegler (puTTON. $5.00)
Tue whole tumultuous thirteenth century is crowded into this life of Frederic the Second. It is a graphic but confused book that gives no quarter to the amateur in history. Only those
who know the period can appreciate Wiegler’s |
subtle and illuminating characterizations.
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MAN AND HIS UNIVERSE
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VIII
HINDENBURG: THE MAN AND THE LEGEND by Margaret Goldsmith and Frederic Voigt (morrow. $3.50)
Tuts biography is controversial, for the sub- title is not mere rhetoric. The authors see Hind- enburg as a typical Junker officer, a perfect military man, who owes his legendary fame to the brilliance and originality of Ludendorff and others. All this is mainly implied, however, and so, as a factual biography and a competent analysis of Hindenburg’s campaigns, the book has its value. But since it stops abruptly with his election to the presidency, one feels the story is but half told and the legend thesis is supported by ignoring subsequent facts.
DOMINATION by Marjorie Johnston (appe- TON. $3.00)
Tuts newest book on Napoleon is built on the theme of his great personal ambition and his desire to dominate both men and events. At first it would seem like underlining a platitude, since even Mr. Wells has not missed this obvious attribute of the Emperor. But Miss Johnston, finding her man more complex, does not stick too close to her theory. Hence she has written a readable and likable book. By means of epi- sodes and character sketches, she makes the most of her subject and her own youthful intensity.
ADVENTURE dy Major-General the Rt. Hon. ]. E. B. Seely (stoxes. $3.50)
Jack Seexy is already a legend in England for his hair-breadth escapes. As an explorer, soldier in the Boer War and the Great War, as well as in the equally dangerous position of Member of Parliament and Secretary of State for War, he was always in the middle of things. Unlike most men of his calibre, when he writes his memoirs he is able to produce a very readable book.
SIMON KENTON dy Edna Kenton (povus.t- DAY, DORAN. $3.50)
Txoucu scholars have been collecting material on Kenton for years, this book, by one of his lineal descendants, is the first complete biog- raphy. Kenton stands with Boone and Clarke in importance, and as a personality he was
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more interesting than either. The author’s ac- count of her ancestor’s exploits among the In- dians is as exciting as a dime novel, though she is painstakingly accurate. The book is an important addition to our records of the early days of Kentucky and Ohio as well as a skilful portrait of a most unusual man.
ALIAS BLUEBEARD by
(BREWER & WARREN. $3.00)
Emile Gabory
M. Gasory is a scholar and his facts about Gilles de Raiz, the most notorious pervert and sadist in history, are indisputable, but the use he makes of them is unsatisfactory. When he traces the career of De Raiz as a soldier under Joan of Arc and as a post-war spendthrift he does it well and with decided éan, but when pathology becomes manifest he is too shocked to be either scientific or sensational.
Fiction
COMRADES AT ARMS dy Paul Feval (Lonc- MANS, GREEN. $2.50)
One wonders, now that it has been done, why Alexander Dumas did not make use of those twenty years following the time of The Three Musketeers. For in this, the fifth volume to fill the hiatus, Paul Feval uses the old formula, with added attractions, to great advantage and carries on the tradition perfectly. D’Artagnan, Cyrano de Bergerac, Mazarin, George Villiers, and a host of swashbuckling supernumeraries, by intrigue and duel, dash through an amazing ferment of events. If Dumas were alive today he would acknowledge this book as brazenly as he signed its prototypes.
GUERRA by Alfred Neumann (xnopr. $3.00)
TuoucH Neumann is best known for his ex- traordinary novel The Devil, published about three years ago, The Rebels and Guerra, its sequels, are really more noteworthy. Using the period of the Carbonari in Italy, he has pro- duced an exciting yet sensitive drama of the conflict between the Grand Duke and Guerra, the rebel leader. It is in the manner of the best historical fiction, where events, though glamorous, are motivated by characters who
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are humanly, enigmatically, human. Though in general terms it is the fight of the old and the new, democracy struggling with aristocracy, the author is too skilful to be didactic. He allows a superb novel to suggest its own implications.
GRAPEVINE éy Jonathan Starr (iveRicut. $2.00)
Tue old adage that there is honor among thieves is well illustrated in this story of Harry the crook, his daughter and “the Kid”, who stood by them both when Harry was sent up the river for life under the Baumes Law. There is, apparently, little double-crossing among the regulars, but in this case “the Boss”, who took the lion’s share of the loot, holding the threat of imprisonment over his henchmen, went one step too far when he tried to seduce Harry’s daughter. The power of the “grapevine”, which is a means of communication between thieves, in and out of jail, reaches everywhere from prison wardens to pickpockets, and is not con- fined to the passing of tips, but oftentimes per- forms a humanitarian service to those who need assistance. Intermingled with the story of these four lives is a daring exposé of political corrup- tion and graft exploited by officers of the law, judges and even district attorneys.
NOT WITHOUT DUST AND HEAT dy Weston Martyr (wasHBuRN. $2.50)
Tuese melodramatic sea and jungle stories are told very quietly, somewhat in the manner of Conrad. Yet in spite of Mr. Martyr’s original plots and genuine conception of character his final results fall far below expectations. But his is an excellent talent which will not fail him when he has something definite to say.
CHANCES éy A. Hamilton Gibbs (.itT1E, BROWN. $2.50)
Here is a novel that starts out rather promis- ingly with two English boys, brothers, setting out for school in France. With the beginning of the second part it becomes the story of brothers, devoted and loyal to each other, who fall in love with the same girl. They both go to the war, which is the resolving factor in breaking up the “triangle”.
Ix
FUGITIVES FROM PASSION dy Coningsby Dawson (DOUBLEDAY, DORAN. $2.00)
Wort Firuian was a man of a single love— first, his wife and, after her death, her image in his young son, was that love. Gordie was exactly like him; as constant and all-consuming as his father’s absorption in him was his own devotion to frivolous Gay Farling. More than frivolous, she was a cheat and a coward. His eagerness to act as doormat for her is irritating, and the solution, while convincing, is one of doubtful happiness. The three main characters are splendidly realized, and the war scenes are horrifying in their reality.
YOUTH DARES ALL Anonymous (Macav- LAY. $2.00)
PicaRESQUE Stories are rare, for some reason, in this country of yarn-spinning Yankees, but this anonymous novel has as foot-loose a good-for- nothing hero as ever got into a book. Its senti- mental, insensitive main character tells his story, and from the series of episodes, told with sick- ening and sanctimonious complacency, there emerges an appallingly real American type, us- ing the high-sounding jargon of cheap novels and “inspirational” books to tell of a spiteful, filthy and dishonest life. The book bears evi- dence of being a labor of fascinated hate. It is as impossible to read it without nausea as without laughter.
THE PASSIONATE ANGEL by Ferrin L. Fraser (sears. $2.00)
Tue title and opening dialogue of this book lead one to expect a smart and humorous ac- count of superficial society, but it is actually a modern tragedy of enormous wealth and too much leisure. It shows the struggle between a man’s loyalty to his friend and his love for the friend’s wife. His degradation is followed by the ultimate triumph of character.
THE FLYING CROMLECH by Hugh de
Blacam (cENTURY. $2.50)
A nook with all Ireland in it—folk-lore, coun- tryside and characters—tells in a fresh, charming and frankly romantic manner of the search for a red-haired lady by a young Irish artist who loved her on sight and set out to find her again.
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BRIDE OF THE NIGHT dy Louise Gerard
(MacauLay. $2.00)
For robbing him of his English heritage and position and for murdering his mother, the mulatto Sultan of Kallu swore eternal venge- ance on Lionel de Tourville and all his children. Death cheated him in the case of the father, and then when he searched for Leslie he found, instead of the son he expected, a lovely daugh- ter. His plans for revenge, changing into love for her, and their subsequent adventures with his blood-thirsty tribe are wildly thrilling. The tragic figure of the half-caste ruler and the bravery and decency of the girl give depth and character to this tale of “darkest Africa”.
CONTACT dy Elliott White Springs (sears. $2.50)
An American Ace writes of a flying man’s experiences during the great war. Just out of college when we enter the war, Winnie decides to become an aviator and, after an intensive training here, goes to England for the finishing touches before being sent to the front. His re- actions to the everyday casualties among his friends, his fear of death and, sometimes, the utter futility of it all, are drawn with a fine understanding by this man who went through the mill. Winnie is just one of the thousands who stood the gaff until the Armistice, then became mental and physical wrecks. The ideal of his fiancée, which he holds throughout, more than any other one factor contributes to his morale and makes of him a successful flyer.
RICE by Louise Jordan Miln (stoxes. $2.00)
Mrs. Miin is a sympathetic chronicler of the Chinese and her latest work is well calculated to gain sympathy. All the characters in Rice are Chinese; the story is of a peasant mother’s love for her daughter and her striving to secure hap- piness for her child. To the mother this means that her daughter must have bound feet, that her hands must be smooth and lily-like to en- able her to make a good marriage. But the mar- riage is an unhappy one, and the pluck and spirit that Pang Soo has inherited from her mother enable her to run away from her hus- band, and to start building her own life as she
wishes to live it. During all the years that Pang Soo wanders about she does not forget her mother’s great craving to eat white rice, and it becomes her aim to gratify her mother’s desire. But “rice” does not mean only food for the body; it is that food of the spirit on which the Chinese have fed, which the highest in rank shares with the lowliest peasant, which has kept the soul of China beauty-loving and sweet.
DESIRES AND DEVICES by Helen Simpson (DOUBLEDAY, DORAN. $2.50)
ME.taNn Forster had been brought up by her aunt, the domineering mistress of the rectory, in rural England of 1816, when the standard for young ladies was a simpering modesty and domesticity and the chief aim in life to procure without delay a husband as wealthy as possible. To escape this dreariness Melian went to keep house for a father of whom she disapproved and whose mind was slightly unbalanced by dissipation. This book dramatically pictures life in the small community lorded over by Sir Hilary Pomfret, and is especially good in the early scenes at the rectory. More interesting than the main story is a secondary tragedy of love and injustice.
DENNY AND THE DUMB CLUCK by J. P.
McEvoy (siMon & SCHUSTER. $1.00)
Tue author himself says that this is a “grudge book”. It is the low-down on the greeting-card racket and who should know it better than the ex-editor of the Volland Company? What goes on behind the scenes before you buy those pretty painted cards to send to shut-ins is as exciting as a melodrama. Mr. McEvoy has stuck close to the known facts of one greeting- card company’s history and has made them into an amusing novel of American business.
MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS dy Stephen Crane (NEWLAND PRESS. $2.50)
Or Crane's work, only The Red Badge of Courage is more talked about than Maggie; but for a hundred readers of the former tale there is probably not one reader of the latter. The Newland Press has made the book accessible to all admirers of Crane.
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THIRTY FATHOMS DEEP dy Edward Ells- berg (popD, MEAD. $2.00)
CoMMANDER E tsserc, U. S. N., who raised the S-51 from her watery grave nearly three years ago, dedicates this new book to his ship- mates on the Falcon who fought with him to reclaim that ill-fated submarine from the bot- tom of the sea. Thirty Fathoms Deep is the imaginary salvage of the Spanish treasure-ship Santa Cruz, scuttled off the coast of Peru three hundred years ago by the Spaniards, who re- fused to give up their cargo of gold and precious stones to Drake and his corsairs. His description of the salvage ship Lapwing and her crew, including four of the divers who were with him on the Falcon, their adventures in the strange and fascinating under-sea world, are graphically drawn. There is evident the same care and thought in the Commander's second book as in his first. His essay into fiction is creditable, for he sticks to his last and builds an interesting plot around his extensive knowl- edge of diving operations.
AXELLE by Pierre Bénoit (pau press. $2.50)
In THE less frenzied mood of twelve years after- wards Pierre Bénoit, President of the Authors’ Society of France, writes of a French prisoner in a German camp and the niece of a retired Prussian general. Without making beasts of the Germans or angels of the prisoners he describes graphically life behind the lines in an enemy camp. Notable for its restraint, this novel tells the tale of two ordinary mortals caught in the toils of love and war, loyalty and passion. Domi- nating the scene is the ancient Reichendorf Castle with its owner, the general, typifying the old military order. Peace leaves the young couple waiting until time shall wipe out the bitter barriers of war’s hatred.
WEST OF FIFTH by Catharine Brody (pvov-
BLEDAY, DORAN. $1.00)
A wELL-wriTTEN novel about an unpleasant young publicity woman, too vain to see her life as anything but dramatic, too stupid to handle it effectively. Her lover is married, and she con- nives with him in cheating, ignoring and hu- miliating his wife; later, married to him, she is cheated, ignored and humiliated in her turn. A
little cosmos of posers and drifters and wire- pullers surrounds the heroine, with one decent human being thrown in to show what Miss Brody can do in that line.
BEAUVALLET by Georgette Heyer (tLonc- MANS, GREEN. $2.50)
Str NicHotas BEauvaLtet, companion to Drake and Frobisher, on a cruise against the Spaniards takes prisoner Dofia Dominica de Rada y Sylva and her father. Notwithstanding great peril he restores them to Spanish soil but not before gaining a promise of marriage from the lady. The following year, disguised as a French en- voy, he and his squire set out for Spain and alone they successfully defy Philip II and the Inquisition. Ultimately he seeks his lady and flees to England and safety. A delightful ro- mance, with all the adventure of olden days.
FLAG IN THE WIND dy Alfred Stanford (morrow. $2.50)
From the time Andy Outen was a young boy working in a marine insurance office he loved the sea; and soon his desire to own a schooner and live on it in his own way occupied him night and day. How his unflagging ambition, aided by patience and industry—although he was really rather an indolent person—enables him to save a schooner abandoned by salvagers, makes an exciting story. It is unpretentiously told, but cannot be fully appreciated unless the reader has some understanding of nautical terms.
THE LUCKY PRISONER by Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (BRENTANO. $2.50)
Tue war between the Catholics and the Hugue- nots in France is the period of still another novel. Jean de la Tour-Miracle, son of a baron, led an adventurous life which brought him into contact with brigands, soldiers, ladies and nobles, and even into the intimate circle of Diane de Poitiers’s castle. Through most of the book and, the author tells us, through much of his life he was someone’s prisoner; his lucky escapes give the book its title. It is written in a humorous vein, much of the amusement aris- ing from poor Jean’s waverings between the charms of two beautiful ladies. (Continued on page xviii)
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In the third of his series on modern American criticism, Mr. Foerster deals with Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, and Lewis Mumford.
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Edited by Seward Collins
AUGUST, 1930
VOL. LXXI; NO. 5
JOHN MASEFIELD: POET LAUREATE
by Odell Shepard
HE RECENT appointment of John Mase-
field, avowed spokesman of the under- dog, to an honored position in the
Royal Household has a piquancy that must have set many persons to re-reading poems long familiar. And it seems likely that not only those who think the Laureateship impor- tant are doing this but some, also, of the few who are thoughtfully concerned with the state of literature at the present time. For these few will not have forgotten that Mr. Masefield was chiefly responsible for the hope, once common and not yet quite abandoned, that our age was to have a poetry of its own, suited to its needs and nature, written in its language. They can still remember how The Everlasting Mercy flashed through the English-reading world in the closing months of 1911, how it seemed to sap the color from all other contemporary verse, and how we felt and said that here at last was “life” (how fond we were and are of the word!) and that while there was life there was hope. Today, therefore, while they read the Collected Poems of the new Laureate, they will be asking themselves what the prom- ised forward march in poetry has amounted to
during these nineteen years, and what has been the loss and gain of the poet whom they took to be its fugleman. A very few may even see this further value and interest in a re- consideration of Masefield, that he is highly representative of our times. Unlike such lonely pioneers as De la Mare and Robinson, who lead us into new countries of the mind, he is a popular poet, one who has shown re- peatedly the skill of a journalist in “giving the public what it wants”. In thinking some- what closely about him, therefore, we may perhaps sharpen and extend our acquaintance with ourselves.
This appointment, even when one consid- ers that it comes from a Labor Government, is at first thought a little surprising, and seems to mark a sharp divergence from the tradi- tion of the office. Three poets of the first rank have dignified the Laureateship during the last hundred years, but, of these, Robert Bridges despised the common man and said so; Tennyson, for all his twinges of senti- mental humanitarianism, had the artisto- crat’s conviction that every man below the rank of the “squirearchy” must be kept in his
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place; and Wordsworth had too close and painful a knowledge of the French Revolu- tion to trust in practice the plebeian simplic- ity which he praised in his poems and pref- aces. These Poets Laureate, then, were men who might naturally be chosen for an office which, from Virgil and Petrarch down, has been thought to entail the glorification of rank and privilege. John Masefield, on the other hand, has early and late proclaimed his championship of the despised and rejected:
Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the road,
The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad,
The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load....
Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth,
The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;—
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth!
Such was this poet’s “consecration” of him- self, and it reads somewhat strangely now that we must think of him as Verse-Maker by Special Appointment to the King. It would seem that there must have been a change in the fashion of kings’ poets—although of course we know that kings are changing too.
Superficially considered, “A Consecration”, looks like a little manifesto on the side of literary realism, and probably it was so in- tended. In the Introduction to his Collected Poems Mr. Masefield has said that the minds of men seem always to “follow one of two purposes in art. . . . Either they strive toward a greater elaboration of artifice or for a greater closeness to reality”. The implication of the context is that he thinks his own work tends away from artifice toward a direct pres- entation of things as they are. No doubt he does really think this, for he has implied it in several other places, and this is certainly the opinion held of him by his more naive ad- mirers. They believe—although he, of course,
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
knows better—that he has drawn his “in- spiration” not at all from literature but from the actual rough-and-tumble of life. When tested by the verse Mr. Masefield has written, however, this opinion is seen to be simply absurd. In his quite different way, he is as artificial as Tennyson or Ronsard or Theoc- ritus; and furthermore he is, again in a way quite different, as bookish as Longfellow. The very lines quoted above from “A Consecra- tion” are thoroughly artificial, heavily deco- rated with youthful rhetoric and elaborate alliteration—although in saying so one should perhaps guard against any possible suggestion that they are therefore “insincere”.
Let any one who still thinks Masefield quite original and unbookish turn to the last few titles of Salt Water Ballads as printed in the collected edition. He will see that “A Ballad of Cape St. Vincent” and the two poems fol- lowing it are in fairly pure Kiplingese, that “D’Avalos’ Prayer” is the same, that “The West Wind” is Yeats and Housman with a tincture of Masefield, that “Vagabond” is watered Kipling, that “Personal” and “On Malvern Hill” are Housman’s own, that “ ‘Rest Her Soul, She’s Dead’” derives from Matthew Arnold, that “In Memory of A. P. R.” is Housman again, “Tomorrow” is Kip- ling, “Cavalier” is Browning, and “A Song at Parting” suggests Stevenson and Yeats. (The proportion of Yeats is much less in the poems named than it would be in another series of selections.) From these thirteen pages I can select only one poem, “On Eastnor Knoll”, that is unmistakably written in Mase- field’s own idiom, showing his characteristic mood and vision, and even this vividly recalls certain familiar lines by W. E. Henley. The fact is that throughout Salt Water Ballads Masefield is looking at the sea and sea-life and “the old brown hills”—things he is sup- posed to report upon at first hand—through books, and he sings about them in the rhythms and tones of other men. These poems were all written, needless to say, when he was still learning his art, and the sedulous aping
JOHN MASEFIELD: POET LAUREATE by ODELL SHEPARD
so evident in them is of course nothing to his discredit or to theirs. I am concerned only to point out that this is not the way in which an unbookish and wholly “original” poet gets his training and grows up.
Neither is this the way of a man whose bent is strongly against the elaboration of artifice. John Masefield uses and elaborates artifice constantly, as every poet and indeed every artist must do. His distinction between the poets of artifice and those who seek “a greater closeness to reality” is in fact un- tenable, for all legitimate literary artifice has as its main purpose the production of an “illusion of reality”. The question is not, therefore, whether a given poet employs arti- fice, for this he must do, but whether he uses it well and to right ends—a question we an- swer most clearly when we can say whether he secures an “illusion of reality” or only “realism”.
This question is not hard to answer with regard to the poetry of John Masefield. It differs from the poetry of Tennyson, let us say, not in being less artificial and not in attain- ing greater closeness to reality but in being— at least now and then, for Masefield has no settled style—“realistic”. In order to see this quite clearly one need only compare the curs- ing match near the beginning of The Ever- lasting Mercy with Tennyson at his worst— say in those sickly euphemisms, justly ridi- culed by Bagehot, in which the earlier Lau- reate tried to suggest without offence that Enoch Arden, a fisherman, carried with him an odor of fish. Now those who prefer in their poetry such carefully culled expressions as “You closhy put... . You bloody liar” to the gingerly circumlocutions in which Ten- nyson referred to Enoch’s fish-basket are cer- tainly entitled to their choice, but the impor- tant point is that both poets are in these passages remote from reality and that “noth- ing resembles a hollow so much as a swell- ing”. The advantage, if there is any, is with Tennyson because he knew, and so did all his readers, that this passage was artificial,
479
being written in a style of deliberate circum- locution which had behind it many centuries of honorable practice; but Mr. Masefield seems to think, as many of his readers have certainly been beguiled into thinking, that the crudity and violence of The Everlasting Mercy and The Widow in the Bye Street rep- resent “reality”. Ah, but reality is harder to capture than this would amount to, and it is not to be taken at all by merely turning the fair false dreams of romanticism upside down or inside out. Such events as these poems describe may happen, have happened, but as they are here told they possess no rep- resentative value. One does not doubt the facts; one merely says that they do not tell the truth.
To understand how remote from reality Masefield’s more violent writing is and to see that it is merely romance pulled inside out, one might do well to compare it with the work of Robert Frost. In the course of such a comparison one is likely to question whether the English poet really cares for reality at all and whether a good part of his energy is not spent in trying to escape it. At no time, so far as his writing shows, has he made a sustained effort to see life steadily and whole. In his later verse and imaginative prose he seldom sings and almost never talks or thinks connectedly; his characteristic tone is a shout, often rising to stridor and then sinking into sepulchral awe-struck mono- tones. One suspects that he does not trust real- ity but fears that it would not endure calm ex- amination. It may be that he has lost the faith that poets live by, and that this explains his falling so frequently back upon physical force and speed, upon mere excitement, oddly interwoven with sighs out of the Celtic Twi- light after the vague abstraction “Beauty”.
But it will not do, while seeing and saying such things, to ignore the enormous difficul- ties that confront a poet such as Masefield in our time—a poet, that is, who still clings to the old romantic notion of the bard as a teacher, preacher, and minor Messiah, There
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is still nobility and strength in this old idea, but today there is also torment; for since the death of Wordsworth, the last great English poet who has thought himself, “else sinning greatly, a dedicated spirit”, the foundations of the poet’s faith, together with a great part of his vocabulary, have been swept away. Poetic metaphor, his very language, is comparatively a poor and shrivelled speech now that he can no longer regard external nature as a subsid- iary revelation of the Divine. Now that most of us have put off our immortal yearnings and have decided that the so-called Spirit of Man, about which the old poets made such a bother, is really no more than a little water and a few salts, the poet finds himself in dan- ger of falling from among the “unacknowl- edged legislators of the world” into the ranks of the numberless entertainers we keep about us to tease us out of thought. John Masefield has managed to save out of this catastrophe, it would seem, hardly anything but his vague and vacillating aspiration toward abstract “Beauty”, concerning which it is hard to make out much except that it probably derives from William Butler Yeats. In his intellectual sit- uation Masefield might do either of two things: track his thought back to its springs in Plato, and so become a metaphysician, or else tighten and steadily maintain his grip on the concrete things of the senses, clasping them all the more tenaciously “because they die”. As it is, he oscillates from one to the other, leaps from scenes of brutality to dim visions of the Mystic Rose, and gives us alto- gether the most extraordinary exhibition of Stimmungsbrechung and ventriloquism that we have heard in English since the days of the Spasmodic School.
Meanwhile, it is clear that all of Masefield’s true poetry is concerned with the concrete, as poetry is likely to be. In the ages of faith the concrete world of the senses was constantly felt to mean something beyond itself, but now that it is shorn of these overtones the poet must use it still. And there is often a pathos in the contemporary use of it such as has not
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
been known in the Western world since the time of the Greek Anthology. One feels this pathos of evanescence and eternal farewell in many of John Masefield’s quieter poems, though never more poignantly than in “Au- gust, 1914”. Even in his passages of speed and violence and uproar it is present, though shouted down. Indeed, one might perhaps say that Masefield makes haste to shout lest he begin to weep. In his characteristic pas- sages of cataloguing and itemization such as that in “Cargoes” or that in the first part of Reynard the Fox he seems to be saying: “See all these many things, in a world of flux and all-conquering death, that we can be quite sure about!” But can we be sure of them, or can he? If so, why such insistence?
Instead of facing reality steadily, John Mase- field seems to see the world about him only by lightning flashes, and so it is not strange that he finds it somewhat lurid. Emerson’s doctrine of the “ecstatic moment”, which had already a long history in Emerson’s time and which was much degraded as well as widely dis-
seminated in Pater’s famous “Epilogue”, has become with Masefield almost a philosophy of life. For him these golden instants—best de- scribed in the poem called “Biography”—are apparently all we have, so that he can say of them, not originally but with sad conviction:
Best trust the happy moments. What they gave Makes man less fearful of the certain grave.
And what, then, does Masefield mean by “happy moments”? Judging from the exam- ples given in this same poem, he means the moments of intense experience, moments of thrill and excitement. He tests the value of an experience by its intensity, which he does not sufficiently distinguish from mere vio- lence. Like Robert Browning, he tends to eval- uate human beings by their passionate in- tensity, and he evidently feels not only that passion is its own reward but its own ex- cuse for being. Obviously, there is no vice or crime—provided only that one is vio lently and passionately inclined to it—that
JOHN MASEFIELD: POET LAUREATE by ODELL SHEPARD
this principle cannot be made to run to. For example, Masefield’s Gwenivere, looking back after Lancelot’s death over her own some- what peccant career as an adulteress and run- away nun, exclaims:
What though I broke both nun’s and marriage- vows...
Love ... will atone.
By “love” she means passion, intensity, golden instants, “happy moments”, and the fact that she has had these will atone for the fact that her passion has wrecked the realm, ruined the goodliest fellowship of knights, shamed her lord, killed her lover. Perhaps it is as well that Shelley’s proud words about poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world have not yet come true, for this sort of legisla- tion would land us very soon in savagery.
In The Everlasting Mercy we find passion and intensity of the grossest sort naively juxta- posed with alleged religious experience. Al- coholic and sexual debauchery is capped by emotional debauch leading to what we are asked to accept as mystic vision and instanta- neous conversion. (Again, I am not denying that such things happen.) The conversion of Saul Kane, which takes place while he is watching a drop of gin roll from the bar to the floor and is inspired by a prolonged period of miscellaneous bestiality, is his “ecstatic mo- ment”. Highly characteristic and marvellously vivid is Masefield’s manner of telling the story, and most significant is the jerk from gin to the Holy Presence:
Miss Bourne stood still and I stood still,
And “Tick. Slow. Tick. Slow” went the clock. She said, “He waits until you knock.”
She turned at that and went out swift,
Si grinned and winked, his missus sniffed.
I heard her clang the Lion door,
I marked a drink-drop roll to floor; It took up scraps of sawdust, furry, And crinkled on, a half inch, blurry; A drop from my last glass of gin; And someone waiting to come in, A hand upon the door latch gropen
481 Knocking the man inside to open.
I know the very words I said,
They bayed like bloodhounds in my head. “The water’s going out to sea
And there’s a great moon calling me;
But there’s a great sun calls the moon,
And all God’s bells will carol soon
For joy and glory and delight
Of someone coming home tonight.”
This is already a famous passage, and in some ways it deserves to be, yet one feels that there should be and that there is a greater difference than is here indicated between the emotional preparation for religious experi- ence and that which leads, let us say, to mur- der. Saul Kane, for all that is shown, might as well have taken the one turn as the other, and we do not feel assured that when his re- ligious excitement wanes he will not try a little murder for variety. A man such as he, a mere bundle of passions never controlled, accustomed to living at a high pitch of emo- tional intensity, will soon tire of hard labor with Farmer Callow—and when he tires he will turn to something else very passionate and intense.
On the whole this doctrine of the ecstatic moment, this burning always with a hard clear gem-like flame, seems a sorry creed to build a life upon—sufficient for a boy, perhaps, but inadequate for any normal manhood, tragic in old age, and quite insufficient to nourish and sustain a major poet. We need not wonder, therefore, that John Masefield has written a good deal for boys, or that much of his most popular work gives the impres- sion of having been written by a boy—one, to be sure, with amazing funds of informa- tion, with an immense vocabulary, and with eyes that devour whatever moving or highly colored thing they fall upon, but still an un- reflective boy, eager for impressions and ex- citement. By this suggestion I certainly do not mean to imply that his work is puerile, and I am well aware that half a dozen of his poems are the work of a mature mind pro- foundly moved and speaking with its total ac-
482
cumulation of force and wisdom. Such things as “The Faithful”, “The Hounds of Hell”, and “August, 1914”, however, show what he might perhaps have steadily been, whereas Reynard the Fox and Right Royal, to choose the most favorable examples, show what his romantic and sensationalistic philosophy has allowed him to become.
The settled boyishness of much of Mase- field’s writing is, I think, unmistakable, and in almost any other time than ours, in which childhood and youth are absurdly over- praised and deferred to and imitated, it would have been pointed out more promptly. His fascinated delight in physical conflict and speed and hard blows, his strength in describ- ing violent action and his weakness in trac- ing close thought or subdued emotion, his preference for crude characters—including the lower animals—his deficiency in humorous self-criticism, his perplexity at London and hatred of all great centers of civilization, his sentimentalism, his evangelism, perhaps most of all his view of women as quite too sweet and good for human nature’s daily food— what can these things indicate if not that his mind, superbly eloquent and versatile though it is, has failed to attain maturity? There are times when one feels tempted to say of him, as some one has wittily said about Amy Lowell, that he has no brain above the eyes, and frequently in reading him one must re- cur to Goethe’s remark about Byron: “He is a child when he reflects”. This does not apply to the sonnets of Lollingdon Downs, or to the admirable little book on Shakespeare, which is one of the most delightful of his productions, yet it is applicable to nine-tenths of his work in prose and verse. Had he never done that other one-tenth we should have ig- nored him, but as matters now stand we are justified in testing him by high standards. He is entitled to the extreme rigor of criti- cism.
If only he had learned, long since, to ap- ply such criticism to himself! What does it mean, for example, that two of the feeblest
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
poems he has ever published stand at the very end of his last collected edition, as though they were his latest and therefore his ripest work? And again, what does it mean that one who feels himself indebted to John Mase- field for much keen poetical enjoyment should find himself reluctant even to mention the Laureate’s latest considerable production, the series of Arthurian stories called Midsummer Night? Does it indicate that a boyish atti- tude of mind, a constant search for excitement and intensity and “thrills”, does not serve one well with the coming on of the years? After all, it is the thinker who grows, who smiles at old age as a friend, and Masefield has him- self said that “vitality is shown by capacity for thought”. Or perhaps we need remember only that Masefield is a professional poet (what a ludicrous contradiction in terms!) from whom a sheaf of verse, of whatever quality, is regularly expected. He has said that “if you sit down to write day after day for months on end, you can feel the scum growing on your mind”, True enough, and painfully true; yet nothing should force a writer to put that scum before the world. Or, finally, we may consider that Masefield is and has long been a successful poet, with a larger following, it seems likely, than any other important contemporary writer of Eng- lish verse. Has his reputation at last become a little intimidating to him, as to many of his readers? On this matter also he has said the appropriate word: “Success is the brand on the brow for aiming low”.
Whatever else the bathos of Midsummer Night may signify, the publication of it shows that Masefield cannot or will not criticize his own work. He has shown this more than once before, for he followed the crude but immensely vigorous Everlasting Mercy with the cruder but lifeless Widow in the Bye Street; and after Dauber, powerfully con- ceived and containing—at the opening of Part VI—some of the most thrilling stanzas in English literature, came the flaccid Daf- fodil Fields. Furthermore, in all but the very
JOHN MASEFIELD: POET LAUREATE by ODELL SHEPARD
best of his work, what crashing falls there are from poetry to flattest prose, what num- berless lines that merely fill out the rhyme, what quantities of awkward verbal uphol- stery! All this is familiar enough, and if it had net been obvious even to the most friendly reader then Mr. J. C. Squire’s merciless paro- dies of the Masefield manner would have made it so. But it is entirely gratuitous to write exaggerated imitations of Masefield, for he has himself written—apparently with quite serious intent—this amazing parody of his own style:
Young Will, the son, Heard his sister shriek, He took his gun
Quick as a streak.
He said, “Now, Dad, Stop, once for all.”
He was a good lad, Good at kicking the ball.
His father clubbed The girl on the head. Young Will upped And shot him dead.
The remainder of this poem may be found in Lollingdon Downs. It goes from bad to worse. The most diabolical of parodists could scarcely have imagined anything so atrocious.
In his extraordinary power of “getting up a topic” Masefield shows one of the subordi- nate traits of the first-rate writer. Whatever his subject may be, and he has written upon a wide range of different matters, he seems to see it from the inside and to dominate it entirely. His book Sea Life in Nelson's Time is a masterpiece of patient research. The chapters on the sleeping sickness and the tsetse fly in Multitude and Solitude— all earnestly excavated, no doubt, in the read- ing room of the British Museum-are writ-
483 ten with the authority of an expert. This is a faculty that is seldom sufficiently praised. It is one of the great merits of Daniel Defoe, whom John Masefield resembles in more than one respect. It was one of the characteristics of Shakespeare.
Whatever Masefield has seen with inter- ested attention he can make his reader see. Whatever moves or shines he watches, and remembers. He has the graphic power of John Ruskin, and he often uses it as mi- nutely, though with reference to quite differ- ent objects. Vivid color delights him, but he seems to have little of Ruskin’s eye for symmetry, intricate structure, and spatial rhythms, His most remarkable ability lies in the rendering of swift motion coupled with the excitement of a hunt, a race, or an escape, and here he is as certainly supreme as Milton is in the suggestion of vast space. Often, too, he goes beyond observation and shows us things that can never have fallen before his eye. In this category falls his description of Arthur’s burning of the pirate ship in “Badon Hill”, and the passages about the deserted fear-stricken downs in “The Hounds of Hell” show imagination of a high order.
The fact is that when John Masefield is mastered and absorbed by his subject, so that he forgets his mannerisms and no longer tries to write like John Masefield, he can write about simple things and emotions as well as any one now at work. So he wrote in “August, 1914”—one of the few pure and perfect treas- ures that we won by four years of agony— and so again in his prose book Gallipoli, and once again in the only longer poem of his in which an exacting taste can find hardly a line to alter, “The Hounds of Hell”. It is little less than a calamity that one who can write such things as these at all should do it so seldom.
WHIPPOORWILL
by Mavis Clare Barnett
At midnight when the woods were still
He heard the hidden whippoorwill,
The whippoorwill, the near, clear whippoorwill. Near as the black and burbling spring,
Nearer than midnight at his ear,
What plaintive, melancholy thing,
Too near, too near and clear?
What centuries of mournful pain, What ages unconsoled of grief That it should whimper here again, A stone’s throw from this leaf?
He dared not set his foot ahead,
He dared not reach his hand along Some unseen, steadier branch for dread Of trampling on a song.
But through the uncalculable hush About him in the underbrush
He seemed to hear within that throat The preparation for the note,
The next note laboring up to be.
O dread, O dread expectancy!
For when the moon began to make
More luminous among the brake
The great fern-tops and he could see
Each black frond cut out separately,
Then from the leaf, that same leaf still,
He heard the hidden whippoorwill,
The whippoorwill, the near, clear whippoorwill.
WHIPPOORWILL by MAVIS CLARE BARNETT
Till something troubled him to hear, Though what it was he could not say, Except that something came too near Which should have whistled far away. And now it was like any grief
Cried in his childhood which he heard, And now by that portentous leaf
He stayed and listened to the bird Until the incredible certainty
Of all he yet must be
Was greater in him than fatality.
Note:—The author of this survey of recent American literature is probably the best-known American critic whose approach ts that of Marx- ian Communism. “Bookman” readers will be especially interested in the conclusion which Mr. Calverton reaches, in common with an increas- ing number of observers, that during the coming decade both writers and readers will be forced to align themselves with either Communism or humanism.—Tue Epiror.
HE IMPULSE to revolt in modern Amer- ican literature can be traced to the clos- ing of the frontier in the eighties and the ensuing transformation of America from an agrarian to an industrial nation. This shift in economic emphasis brought with it new conflicts and new conceptions. The rise of American imperialism in the twentieth cen- tury, punctuated by the World War and ac- celerated by its aftermaths, only added in- tensity to these new problems. It is not until the second decade in the century, however, that these problems begin to find active ex- pression in literature. If 1914 may be desig- nated as the year in which this insurgency first reaches a focal point, 1929 may be described as the year in which this insurgency faces its end. 1930 already marks the begin- ning of a new period in American literature. In accordance with historical tendency, we always find revolt first setting in against those new developments which are prone to eclipse the old. For at least four decades now the city in America has grown at the expense of 486
THE DECADE OF CONVICTIONS
by V. F. Calverton
the country. Our whole civilization, as a con- sequence, has grown further and further away from the soil. The farmer has been caught in a losing struggle with the financier. Frank Norris was one of the first of our novelists to take up cudgels in defence of the “ranch against the railroad”, which was his way of defining the conflict. In his novel The Octopus this struggle achieved a moving but melodramatic climax. Edward Bellamy in The Duke of Stockbridge was concerned with this same clash. Hamlin Garland, too, dealt with it in another form in several of his earlier books. Mr. Garland, in fact, was one of the first to point out the real tragedy of defeat that underlay this struggle. The de- feat of the pioneer farmer meant the quick destruction of American idealism. If this lit- erature of revolt and lamentation had stopped there, we should not be concerned with it in this essay. What we find, however, is that even today, with the city everywhere victo- rious, writers such as Willa Cather, Ruth Suckow and Sherwood Anderson continue to dedicate a considerable part of their work to this same theme.
Willa Cather’s Antonia grows as intimately out of the soil as a tree or a flower. Her Alexandra finds her ecstasy in the earth rather than in the artificial and vicarious de- vices of art. And yet, as Miss Cather reveals in her later novels, A Lost Lady and The Professor’s House, all this devotion is to a lost cause. The spirit of the pioneer is dead.
THE DECADE OF CONVICTIONS by V. F. CALVERTON
The old ideals of the country have been ruined by the predatory advances of the city. Only emotional emptiness remains and the desolation that follows defeat. Ruth Suckow’s Country People is a literary testimony to what has occurred. Her characters are dull, drab people, unimaginative as robots. It is they who are typical of the new generations of “country people” who have come into be- ing since the passing of the frontier, and whose more aspiring but not more enticing cousins in the small town Sinclair Lewis has satirized with such success. If we except such writers as John T. Frederick, and certain of the interesting but minor authors gathered within the pages of The Midland Magazine, and, we might add, Glenway Wescott, who still moves in this tradition, Sherwood An- derson can be said to be the last of that group of novelists whose interests and enthusiasms are still more with the country than with the city. Sherwood Anderson, for example, to this very day is a believer in the artisan and not the machine. He would have us go back to our hands for inspiration. The machine which destroys the use of hands is an enemy of civilization—for it is in hands, Anderson says, that we find “the beginning of that love of surface, of the sensual love of ma- terials, without which no true civilization can be born”. Almost every story and novel of Anderson’s from Windy McPherson’s Son to Dark Laughter has in it an undertone of rustic nostalgia. And in his latest book, Hello Towns, he is entirely concerned with rural things and rural people. More, the fact that Anderson himself deserted the city for the country and found in the editing of two country newspapers more joy, as he has said, than in any form of work he might do in the city, is but an additional evidence of his interests and affections.
While the philosophy of these writers might be called reactionary, in that it favors, and would go back to, the country instead of the city—in a civilization which has managed
to progress mainly through the growth of
487 cities—it cannot be said that it is without the spirit of revolt. The revolt may be reaction- ary, but it is revolt none the less. And it is revolt, reactionary and radical, that has sounded the dominant note in American lit- erature in the last two decades, particularly since 1914. That date is important in Amer- ican literature as the year in which the revolt in poetry began. Almost all the standard poetic forms, the epic, the ode, the sonnet, even the general theories prevalent in English poetry as to rhyme and rhythm, grew up out of feudal life and tradition. Its essential stress, in keeping with the character of the civilization, was upon regularity of form and rigidity of structure. Although on the stage, for instance, with the rise of the middle classes, revolt had early set in against such feudal standards as the aristocratic conception of tragedy and the doctrine of the three uni- ties, poetry remained comparatively unas- sailed by the new milieu. If its substance changed, its structure did not. Even when Byron and Keats effected their anapestic and dactylic invasion, it was not so much in an attempt to revolt against the old form as it was an attempt to diversify and enrich it. To a certain extent, this delay in revolt was due to the fact that poetry depends more in- timately upon tradition than does the stage or even the novel. Even in an age which was increasingly individualistic, then, the poet had to express his individualism in a most unindividualistic form. It is in America, how- ever, where, with the frontier, individualism reached its most advanced stage, that the first revolt against the old poetic form is to be discovered. Walt Whitman is the great rebel. Now one of the most interesting as- pects of Whitman’s revolt is to be found in the disparity between the time of its appear- ance and time of its acceptance. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, but its influence upon American poetry is not to be detected until the twentieth century. Whitman not only represented the spirit of democracy in his philosophy, but he also
488
embodied the democratic spirit in his attack upon poetic form. His revolt conferred upon the individual the right to be an iconoclast in form as well as content. Great individualists such as Emerson and Carlyle sensed the sig- nificance of Whitman’s revolt even in his own day, but the poets themselves did not awaken to its meaning until the twentieth century. The free-verse movement was a di- rect outgrowth of Whitman’s influence. Of course, in another sense, it is a movement in itself, arising out of forces that along with the World War came to a sharp climax in and around the year 1914. Whitman prima- rily served as one of its early prophets. The free-verse insurgents, dividing themselves into various camps—expressionists, imagists, vorticists—and developing such intellectual leaders as Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell soon came to dominate the field of poetic creation. One poetic invention succeeded another, each more iconoclastic than its predecessor. Every- thing new and individualistic was extolled; everything old and formalistic was scorned. Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, Margaret Ander- son’s Little Review, Ezra Pound’s Blast, and a score of smaller magazines, among which Secession, Broom, and S4N should be remem- bered, provided new mediums for the expres- sion of this new revolt. Free verse every- where became the common practice. Vachel Lindsey, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Maxwell Bodenheim, “H. D.”, Alfred Kreymborg—all became advocates of the new verse. Very soon this great revolt in poetry found an active counterpart in prose.
All the extremes to which this revolt ran and, to an extent, still runs, are to be traced to the struggle, grown desperate in the last two decades, of expressing individualism in philosophy in a world that is socialized be- yond individualistic control. The artist in particular, whose individuality has been egged on to the point of idiosyncrasy in its struggle for survival, has felt this contradic- tion in its most devastating forms. Contemp-
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
tuous now, in these days of chaos of the standards of the middle class, he has never- theless absorbed as much of the philosophy of middle-class individualism which fits in so well with certain cravings of his tempera- ment, as has the entrepreneur. While he would agree with Flaubert that “down with the bourgeoisie isgthe beginning of virtue” it is the morals of the bourgeoisie and not its individualistic doctrine that he finds such an anathema. That is why today, when individ- ualism as a philosophy is threatened on all sides, and, as John Dewey says, we must pre- pare ourselves for adjustment in a world of corporate or collective economy, we have in- dividualism in art running the gamut of every exaggeration and extreme. And what is even more important to note is that these exaggerations and extremes are to be found not only in literature but in every art. Walt Whitman was not accepted until the twentieth century because the fight for in- dividualistic expression in poetry had still been able to find its voice, for the most part, in the old forms. In the twentieth century that was no longer possible. New forces were at work in civilization, and still newer things had to be said. Democracy at last struck at poetic form, and the right of the individual artist to be a complete individualist in his art was established. Whitman’s revolt against the old forms was succeeded by revolts so far- reaching that by the end of the second decade of the century we had poetry—and prose—so individualistic that its meaning was lost in the ultimately individual. The early release that this individualism got in the pages of The Little Review attains a kind of curious climax in the poetry of E. E. Cummings and the prose of Gertrude Stein. In these lines of Cummings, describing a goldfish, this indi- vidualistic extravagance is most obvious:
a: crimbflitteringish is arefloatsis ingfallall! mill, shy milbrightlions my (hurl flicker handful in) dodging are shybrigHteyes is crum bs (alll) if, ey Es.
THE DECADE OF CONVICTIONS by V. F. CALVERTON
Gertrude Stein is certainly no less eccentric in her prose. Nor has James Joyce before, who is the greatest of these literary sans-culottes, steered very far away from this same kind of word-confusion in his most recent book: Work in Progress. In fact, around this latter work, so intense has been the controversy con- cerning it, a new school of ultra-individualistic critics has gathered. In their magazine, transi- tion, which extended this individualistic revolt far beyond the point where The Little Re- view left it, they even went so far as to evolve a new theory of art in order to justify their work, In their Proclamation, which is already famous, they clearly stated that “the writer expresses; he does not communicate”. This, when all is said, is the ultimate extent to which individualistic doctrine can run. All responsibility to the reader or onlooker is cancelled. Nothing but the individual artist matters. The inevitable tendency of such in- dividualism is to create art objects, poems, novels, dramas, or paintings, that can only be understood by the individual artist who creates them. And that is why, as a final re- sult of this revolt, we began to produce an art that was ingrown instead of expansive.
That the last stages of this revolt unmis- takably represent the swift disintegration and decay of individualism in our day can scarcely be gainsaid. The words of Margaret Anderson—the editor of The Little Review, in which most modern American poets first found a voice—at the beginning of her book, My Thirty Years’ War, “My greatest enemy is reality. I have fought it successfully for thirty years”, supply an excellent cue as to what was happening in the minds of these writers. They feared reality because it was opposed to them. Reality was becoming less individualistic, while they, like vestiges lost on a sea, were anxious to become more individualistic in order to survive. Instead of fighting reality, however, in an effort to change it, they tried to deny it as a method of escape. Hence the absurd extremes to which such a revolt inevitably raced.
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The nineteen-twenties, with the rapid changes in economic and social life that fol- lowed the World War, brought us to another stage in our literary history. While the in- dividualistic emphasis was not destroyed, it took on a very different form. Henry L. Mencken became its critical embodiment. For a decade Mr. Mencken exercised an in- fluence over American literature unparalleled by that of any other critic in this generation. Mr. Mencken is a successor to the so-called literary muck-rakers who sprang up in the early part of this century. While he did not —and still does not—represent in his revolt a philosophy of social reform such as did Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, David Graham Phillips and others of that school, he did represent revolt against the traditions of American criticism which were derived from the influence of William D. Howells and his professorial contemporaries. Mr. Mencken’s philosophy, sharpened by the ef- fects of the war, was without the optimisms and exciting faiths of the revoltés of the teens. Indeed, even while the poets of the new school were continuing to rise and win larger audiences, Mr. Mencken declared his contempt for poetry, which he described as a childish art. Theodore Dreiser, who has come closer than any other American writer to describing certain of the more obvious but formidable aspects of our industrial civiliza- tion, became Mr. Mencken’s great inspiration. What Mr. Mencken saw in Dreiser, and that which made Dreiser an important figure in American literature for many other critics of that period, was that futilitarian philosophy which became a mood of the age in the decade following the war. The disillusion- ment of those days found its most vivid ex- pression in cynicism rather than despair. Even gaiety began to revolve about the sneer. Beliefs were deserted, and values scorned. Sinclair Lewis’s novels Main Street, Babbitt, and Elmer Gantry were part of that same literary sneer. Sherwood Anderson, but for a different reason as we noted before, saw only
490
emptiness in our civilization. James Branch Cabell, in romantic escape to the imaginary realm of Poictesme which he invented as a special retreat, was still more cynical of values and beliefs. The works of Joseph Hergesheimer were also of that ilk. Even Eugene O'Neill, with all his excellent prob- ings of character and plot, did not rise be- yond that philosophy of life. His latest play, Dynamo, reveals that attitude in its most tragic form. The last of this group to gain influence is Ernest Hemingway, whose novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms portray ever so clearly the depths of disil- lusionment into which youth was plunged as a result of the war.
If we should call the period from 1914 to 1920 the age of revolt in modern American literature, we should then call the period of the twenties the age of cynicism. In this latter period, the stress was not upon values but upon the folly of them. The spirit of the age was destructive and not constructive. Its con- tributions were negative and not positive. In another form, it represented the debacle of individualism—as at its last debauch.
In the thirties today we are already con- fronted with a new tendency and the be- ginning of a new period. Mr. Mencken’s in- fluence has already waned, and the writers of his decade, with the exception of Heming- way, no longer dominate the literary scene. Changes in our economic life are already be- ginning to show their effects in our literature. As a consequence of these changes, we are facing now a new age—an age of convictions. Too much has happened in our history now for us to be content with the sneer. The age of cynicism is no longer able to meet the de- mands of our youth. Beliefs are needed again, and values that are social and not anarcho- individualistic. It is the need of formulating these new values that is rapidly becoming our chief concern. The success of Thornton Wilder on one side, and John Dos Passos and
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
Michael Gold on another, is an evidence of the new era. In The Woman of Andros, Mr. Wilder is interested in finding a new set of values for our age. Paganism and Christian- ity are sifted in the process. T. S. Eliot, au- thor of The Waste Land and the leading poet who has come out of America in this genera- tion, is now convinced that “the greatest poets have been concerned with moral values”. Mr. Dos Passos and Mr. Gold are interested in values of a different kind—but they are values just the same. The values that Mr. Eliot is interested in are religious values; the values that Mr. Dos Passos and Mr. Gold are interested in are radical values. This whole struggle finds a central point in the present controversy over humanism. Mr. Irv- ing Babbitt and Mr. Paul Elmer More, the two leaders of American humanism, with the change in spirit of the age, have regained the position of influence which they had some years ago. The humanists are concerned with self-reform; the radicals are concerned with social reform. The humanists are conserva- tive; their attitude toward man, toward gov- ernment, toward labor, toward literature, is conservative. The radicals are revolutionary; their attitude toward man, toward govern- ment, toward labor, toward literature, is revolutionary. The humanists are individual- istic; the radicals are collectivistic. Both sides, however, know what they are about; both sides have definite convictions. And _ this decade which, in contrast with the preceding one, has already given every omen of being an age of convictions, will provide the battle ground for this new conflict. Humanists and radicals alike insist upon bringing literature back to life, and of interpreting literary values in terms of life values. Those who continue in the tradition of the twenties, re- fusing to interpret literature in terms of life, and separating literary values from life values, will find their influence weakening as the decade advances.
MINOR FICTION IN THE EIGHTIES
by Forrest Reid
GREAT many novelists were busy in A eighties, so busy that with not a
few two novels a year appears to have been the normal rate of production, and it is to be remembered that two novels then meant five volumes, more often six. I read a considerable number of these books long ago, so that they are now but the veriest phantoms floating in a mist of associations real and imaginary, the hour and the place— window seat or walled garden, river or sea- shore, winter fire or summer sun—often emerging in far more vivid detail than the author and his work. I do not know why I should find it so much easier to remember where and when I read this or that book than to remember (beyond a mere general sense of happiness or unhappiness and a few detached scenes and characters) its contents, but so it is. I was brought up in a house full of novels, most of them belonging to the seventies and eighties, and in my teens I read with an appetite not easily sated: moreover I read honestly, pronouncing the words and never skipping, so that I feel a great deal more should have remained than actually has. I read all the descriptions of sunsets provided so liberally and conscien- tiously by William Black. Unlike the descrip- tions of Thomas Hardy and Victor Hugo (in which I found a mysterious affinity) they created absolutely no impression on my mind because, I think, they had created very little upon his. Still I read them, though after
three or four books I reached the conclusion that Black was not to be one of my authors, and for no better reason, I’m afraid, I have not included him in my present survey. I read all the moralizings provided by novelists with a “purpose” or a “problem”, but there was less virtue here, “problem” novels pos- sessing at that time a curious fascination for me.
It was in 1883 that Olive Schreiner, with The Story of an African Farm, produced what must have been among the earliest of these. That is to say, of the modern variety, for of course there had been the experiments of Charles Reade and Wilkie Collins. But it was The Story of an African Farm which paved the way for The Yellow Aster, David Grieve, and The Heavenly Twins of the nineties. Miss Schreiner, if she stood a little apart from the band of feminine novelists associated with the New Woman, neverthe- less practically invented her. The Woman’s Rights novel, the Religious Doubts novel, the Sex novel—seeds of all these were wafted from her farm in Africa to produce a variegated crop of fictions bearing such titles, disconsolate or provocative, as A Superfluous Woman, A Sunless Heart, The Woman Who Did—works widely discussed at the time and which it would be difficult by any effort of imagination to reanimate today. As novels the interest they excited was violent and brief. They annoyed Andrew Lang; they gained the sympathy if not the admiration
491
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of Thomas Hardy; they left the small esthetic camp indifferent. And of them all, The Story of an African Farm alone survives, because of the fervor behind it. It is not a book to be re-read. Even in the eighties its appeal must have been mainly to youthful readers, with whom the generosity of its spirit would outweigh crudities of form and characteriza- tion. To myself the book appealed pro- foundly, and in an ancient copy lying on the table before me quite a jungle of marked passages remains to show me where I was moved—if not, alas, to show me why. My favorite chapter must have been that con- taining the allegory of the Hunter and Truth, since this is pencilled from beginning to end, while Lyndall’s dissertations on the rights and wrongs of women get not a single mark.
In fairness, it must be granted to the author that her story created the state of mind most likely to prove receptive to her “message”. There was art in it—or possibly I should say inspiration—but the book was not conceived as a work of art. It was an indictment, a sermon, a confession of faith, an appeal for justice, anything you like but a work of art, and as it stands it is an odd mixture of caricature and reality. Bonaparte Blenkins, the serio-comic villain, is not a real man; he bears, in fact, though sadly degen- erated, a distinct resemblance to Mr. Punch: Waldo—my own dear Waldo—is not a real boy; and Lyndall, I am afraid, though she was the author’s darling, is not a real girl. What is real is Olive Schreiner, and where she identifies herself with her characters the fundamental feelings ring true. The human- ity of the book is unmistakable. The author packed between its covers everything she had to say: she was not afraid to let herself go, not afraid to gush; it was all infinitely more personal, infinitely more confidential than most autobiographies.
So far as I am aware it struck a completely new note. I think it was George Meredith who read and accepted the manuscript for
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
Messrs. Chapman and Hall, but it certainly was not because he saw in Miss Schreiner a disciple. As a matter of fact, to accept The Story of an African Farm showed courage; even more than had been displayed by James Payn when he read and refused John Ingle- sant. The book reflected a new spirit which had begun to manifest itself among serious novelists but which so far had received scant encouragement from their critics. It was be- fore everything a book of revolt, a demand for freedom, though all that Olive Schreiner herself was interested in was the social question.
In other quarters the demand for freedom was based on esthetic grounds. The novelist felt himself to be hampered: there were sub- jects of profound interest he was only al- lowed to treat dishonestly, if at all. There arose a clamor for what a character in one of Henry James’s stories calls “the larger lati- tude”. The ironic little masterpiece in ques- tion, The Death of the Lion, was perhaps rather cruel, since it must have been difficult not to associate Guy Walsingham the author of “Obsessions”, with a lady who, also writ- ing under a masculine pen-name, had at- tracted a good deal of attention just then. Both Keynotes and Discords, though I have read neither, I suspect to be experiments in “the larger latitude’—which phase, I need scarcely add, means latitude to write with frankness of the relations of the sexes. It was bitterly opposed, and among the most acri- monious of the opposers were several of our novelists themselves, notably Mrs. Oliphant, who attacked the later tales of Thomas Hardy with a virulence that leaves us gaping. Still more amazingly, Wilkie Collins had contrived to offend the innocents. There would be little point in reviving these inepti- tudes were they not the outward and visible signs of a widespread spiritual prudery. An editorial note which appeared in The Graphic for January 30, 1875, reveals the re- markable state of mind that had been created by an attitude of excessive moral vigilance:
MINOR FICTION IN THE EIGHTIES by FORREST REID
In last week’s instalment of The Law and the Lady the following paragraph, which oc- curs on page 83, column 2, was printed thus:— “He caught my hand in his and covered it with kisses. In the indignation of the moment I cried out for help.” In the author’s proof the passage stood as follows:—“He caught my hand in his, and devoured it with kisses. His lips burnt me like fire. He twisted himself suddenly in the chair, and wound his arm round my waist. In the terror and indignation of the moment, vainly struggling with him, I cried out for help.” The editor of this journal suppressed a portion of the paragraph on the ground that the description as originally given was objec- tionable. Mr. Wilkie Collins having since in- formed us, through his legal advisers, that, ac- cording to the terms of his agreement with the proprietors of The Graphic, his proofs are to be published verbatim from his ms., the passage in question is here given in its original form.
One up to Wilkie! we may think, but this was not to be the last word. Our editor per- fectly foresaw his opportunity and, sure
enough, when The Law and the Lady had run its course as a serial and was issued in three volumes, The Graphic, instead of the customary review, beneath the title of the work simply printed an apology to its read- ers for having provided them with a tale the true nature of which had only been dis- covered after its first chapters were in print. Possibly the apology was sincere; possibly moral feelings really were wounded; in any case it was inevitable that a point of view so narrow, so stupid, should lead to a re- action, and in the eighties the backward— or forward—sweep of the pendulum had begun. Quite apart from The Story of an African Farm and its New Morality, the early novels of George Moore and George Gissing were experiments in naturalism. True, in the case of Gissing there was to be no tampering with the proprieties, and even the naturalism remained far from unquali- fied. But George Moore showed a less con- ciliatory spirit, and in his very first story, A Modern Lover, published in 1883, through
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the mouth of Harding the novelist he pro- duced his manifesto: “We do not always choose what you call unpleasant subjects, but we try to go to the roots of things; and the basis of life, being material and not spiritual, the analyst inevitably finds himself, sooner or later, handling what this senti- mental age calls coarse”.
Gissing, I think, never handled what any age, however sentimental, could call coarse, but he had a passion for the sordid (founded on dislike), and even when it was not necessarily in his subject a kind of flatness of his style produced a drab and dispiriting effect. The novels are devoid of charm, and the monotonously despondent tone somehow suggests a low vitality. Behind them is neither a lyrical nor a dramatic impulse, nor the impulse of the born story-teller. It is work we must respect; he never wrote a cheap nor an insincere passage; but in all these novels of middle-class life I cannot re- call a single beautiful line. And it is not because of the subject. In the slum scenes of The Princess Cassamassima Henry James used material quite as sordid, but there was joy in the making of the book and his genius infused its darkest pages with the spirit of life and beauty. The value and meaning of a subject obviously must vary with what we bring to it, and it seems to me that Gissing brought little beyond the knowledge of the historian and the student of social problems. His incidents are pre- sented in a curiously muffled fashion; there is never a sharp detonation. Moreover, he never really learned the technique of nat- uralism; in his method he was anything but an innovator:
She proceeded to eat a supper scarcely less substantial than that which had appeased her brother’s appetite. Start not, dear reader; Alice is only a subordinate heroine.
Oh, the gravity of conviction in a white- souled English girl of eighteen! Do you not hear her say these words?
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He does not realize that it is just such tiresome little apostrophes that prevent us from hearing her. I must confess that it seems to me odd that Gissing’s desire to write a realistic novel should have carried him no further than it did, that his experi- ments should have stopped short with the matter, leaving the manner to look after itself. There were models with which he must have been acquainted. Whether one approved of the story or not, surely it was plain that the method of Madame Bovary had a good deal to do with its extraordinary effect of reality, and whether one liked that method or not, surely it proved the advan- tage of possessing a method. But whatever other changes were taking place in the fic- tion of the eighties, whatever other activities were astir, except in the work of Henry James and George Moore the technique of the novel remained practically stationary. The authors’ annoying “asides” continued to come crashing through the illusion like stones through a sheet of glass. And some- times these “asides” extended for pages. Only too frequently, indeed, in the average novel of the period, they were there for no other reason than that they did extend for pages, and so helped to fill out the compulsory three volumes. Lengthy discussions (dialogue only by courtesy) fulfilled a similar purpose.
The three-volume convention was a dis- aster. Most of the novels of the eighties are too long. Even where he does not quite shamelessly resort to padding we see the author deliberately slackening his pace be- cause he must not reach the end too soon. And the faults we find in the lesser writers are present also in the works of the masters. If there is less genius in the novel of today, I think we may claim that there is more science. And the writing is less stilted. The moderns I dare say err on the other side, but let me give an example of what I mean. One of the chief merits of the novels of Rhoda Broughton is the vivacity of the dialogue, but re-read a page of that dialogue
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merely changing “have not I?” and “do not you?” to “haven’t I?” and “don’t you?”, and note the result: the actual sound of the voices immediately begins to reach us. After making allowance for the modifications that must have taken place in our speech, I think it will hardly be denied that in the average modern novel the writing is more flexible than it was in the eighties, that the novel itself contains less surplusage; that it does, in short, show an advance in craftsmanship. True, the question instantly suggests itself— Does the average novel either of the eighties or the nineteen-thirties matter? And if not, what is the position? In the eighties Henry James, Hardy, Meredith and Stevenson were all writing, while from America came several brilliant and charming novels by W. D. Howells, and at least one masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn.
Looking back across the stretch of half a century we can, for our present purpose, see our novels and novelists divided into groups or schools—the realistic, the romantic, the pastoral. On the other hand when we come to consider the more outstanding works with an idea of seeking relationships with the past or future, our time-scheme presents an oddly broken line. Thus, though it is not fanciful, perhaps, to point to a relationship between W. H. Mallock’s The New Re- public, published in 1877, and Mr. Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow, published in 1921, what have we in between? Casting backward from The New Republic we arrive at Head- long Hall and Nightmare Abbey, which constitute, I suppose, the fountain-head. Again, Baring-Gould’s Mehalah has nothing in common with the rural tales of Thomas Hardy, but much in common with Wuthering Heights. John Inglesant may have derived something from Henry Esmond, but the historical romances of Stanley Weyman, “Q,” and Conan Doyle owe far more to the tales of Dumas than to The Cloister and the Hearth; while one of the most brilliant books of our whole decade, one of the least
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popular and at the same time most likely to survive, Richard Garnett’s The Twilight of the Gods, goes straight back to Vathek. As for the modern mystery story, how can we compare it with The Moonstone or The Woman in White? And still less is it com- parable with the tales of the Irish novelist, Sheridan Le Fanu, that so strangely under- estimated writer whose work at its best has a streak of genius running through it and hovers on the edge of a rather dreadful kind of poetry.
Probably the most popular novels of the late eighties and early nineties were the romances. I do not include John Inglesant among them, because, though it certainly was popular and a romance, it was essentially a spiritual confession, a novel of ideas, very nearly as much so as Marius the Epicurean, and spirituality is hardly the distinguishing quality of King Solomon’s Mines, Dead Man’s Rock, A Gentleman of France, or The White Company. It was, I venture to say, Andrew Lang who to a large extent created the vogue of the romantic school. For Lang could make a reputation, or at any rate sell an edition, in a way no critic can today. And he loved these books—loved them so well that they seem to have had the power to blunt his critical faculty, which could be fastidious enough in other directions. I re- member reading a novel by Hume Nisbet, dedicated to Lang “by special permission”, and which struck me even at the age of fourteen as a little crude. The comic pas- sages—as is usually the case—were particu- larly excruciating, and Lang, whose own humor was so charming, must have loathed them. Still he would have these books, and nobody dared to contradict him. His prestige, his learning, his wit and his irony, were too formidable; in the heyday of his influ- ence not a voice was raised in revolt, and even timid disagreements were larded with compliments.
Lang could be generous when it pleased him. He wrote charmingly of Rhoda
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Broughton, with a graceful half affectionate playfulness which conveyed at the same time a perfect appreciation of her talent. Yet (and it might be in the same article), he would ridicule a tale of Tolstoy’s without having troubled to read it, describe Esther Waters as the unfortunate production of an Irish- man without humor, and dismiss Hardy’s Tess in a tone of magnanimity that must have been infuriating. He infuriated Henry James, though he had praised Washington Square and had done Miss Annie P., or Daisy Miller, the honor of bringing her into his delightful book of epistolary parodies, Old Friends. But it was the early James Lang liked, the James who, largely on the strength of Daisy Miller, actually for a few years achieved popularity. If he disapproved of the subject of a book or the point of view of a writer, no sincerity, no subtlety of treat- ment could win his praise, while if the sub- ject were to his taste he could tolerate almost any treatment. On the other hand, when both subject and form pleased him—then, even in the case of such exotic writers as Edgar Poe and Gérard de Nerval, he became the most sensitive and sympathetic of critics, But he was whimsical, Puckish, sometimes not without a hint of cruelty in his wit, and his taste in fiction remained to the end the taste of a schoolboy who is good at games.
Whether we attribute it to “freakishness” or to an odd insensibility, with the solitary exception of Stevenson, the more important novelists of his generation had very little for which to thank Lang. Even his appre- ciation of Rhoda Broughton’s work we can- not help suspecting to be in part at least due to friendship. Elsewhere he shows not the slightest sympathy with her kind of novel. His treatment of it is to play with it like a cat with a mouse, giving delicate but painful taps at the style, plot and char- acters, before the final pounce that finishes it off. But for Rhoda Broughton he reserved another method. Miss Broughton did not, we are told, in conversation at all events,
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take her novels very seriously, and this in itself would appeal to Lang. That she must have taken them seriously in one sense, however—that of being profoundly moved by what she was writing at the time of writing—is obvious. The emotion behind them must have been genuine since it still lives. She founded her own school and carried it on through the seventies and eighties—the school that is, for me at least, permanently associated with “Bentley’s Fa- vourite Novels”, fat dark green books, the contents of which usually first had been serialized in Temple Bar. 1 once planned to read them all, and I think must have come pretty near to succeeding.
In the Bentley tradition, after Not Wisely But Too Well and Cometh Up as a Flower, Rhoda Broughton had it very much her own way till the late eighties, when Miss Corelli was admitted to the fold, and promptly upset everything, capturing the public by the ir- resistible baits of melodrama and an oc- cultism that smacked of the Egyptian Hall. Rhoda Broughton’s popularity had distinctly waned when in 1890 she published Alas!, though she still, in that novel, kept to the manner which had made her famous. In Belinda, which belongs to 1883, she had to my mind reached the highest point of her attainment. She had been writing then for seventeen years, and without losing any of her early zest had acquired more restraint. The love scenes in Belinda have all the old power, but it is now under firmer control, and her wit and humor, I think, are more abundantly in evidence here than in any other of the tales. The interest of Belinda, as indeed of all the novels of her first period, is frankly and almost exclusively erotic, but it is clean and healthy, and the passion does come through; there are no young women in fiction more genuinely in love than Rhoda Broughton’s. What they experience, I admit, is largely an infatuation of the senses, and only a physical infatuation, I suppose, could work the physical havoc which brings more
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than one of these heroines to an early grave. The heroes are of tougher fibre; they sur- vive all right—superb animals, glorious in strength if ugly in feature. This worship of brawn is carried to a point where to the weakling it may become on occasion just the least bit trying. The male whose interests are intellectual is so exclusively used as a foil to some Herculean numskull. We see him wrapped in overcoats and mufflers, an um- brella tucked under his arm, and galoshes on his large flat feet. There is something ruth- less in the way the physical infirmities of Belinda’s husband, Professor Forth, are kept before us. They acquire in the end a kind of moral quality, become a part of the general despicableness of his character—its mean- ness, selfishness, joylessness and narrow- mindedness. For not only is the intellectual male usually depicted as unsound in wind and limb, but he is also denied any compen- sating graciousness of manner, and above all his loves are as feeble as his muscles. Not for him splendid, reckless passions, and it is by his capacity for experiencing an over- whelming passion that man in these novels is judged. True, in the tales of her second period Rhoda Broughton worked gradually away from this point of view (her sense of humor was so strong that this perhaps was inevitable once the emotional impulse had begun to die down), but in the earlier, and to my mind distinctly superior, novels the hero, whatever the hue of his moral char- acter, whether he have the black reputation of Colonel Stamer (in Not Wisely But Too Well) or the innocent record of “a non- reading, hard-rowing, footballing, cricketing” youth like David Rivers, Belinda’s lover— the hero, whatever his moral feelings may be, must be endowed with two transcendent physical qualities, a superb body and a capacity for fierce and devouring passion. Miss Broughton’s attitude in all this, if perfectly comprehensible, is none the less un- usual—unusual, that is to say, in its out-
spokenness. And if today we find in her
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love scenes a remarkable abandon, what effect were they likely to have produced on readers of the eighties, accustomed to heroines of an angelic modesty and decorum? The books were read and adored, but they were also banned and banished as coarse and unmaidenly. They were not ac- tually “wicked”—“wickedness” was reserved for Ouida, and naturally there were no “brown, painted harlots” in Miss Broughton’s pictures of county society; but she was all the more dangerous because her characters were human. “I began my career as Zola,” she remarked in her old age to Mr. Percy Lubbock. “I finish it as Miss Yonge. It’s not I that have changed, it’s my fellow- countrymen.”
Rhoda Broughton had little sense of style and her habit of writing in the historic present was not without its inconveniences; but her books had the warmth of life in them and their success was deserved. More- over, considering the narrow range of sub- ject, the variety we find in these for the most part tragic love dramas is surprising. It springs from the fact that the love motive is felt so intensely that fresh incidents and situations have never to be sought for, but spring up spontaneously in the writer’s imagination. Nothing quite like these books had been done before, though only too much was done afterwards, one of the most popu- lar imitations, Comin’ Thro’ the Rye, on its first appearance, anonymously, being ac- tually attributed to Rhoda. The irrepressible F. C. Burnand parodied her in Punch, and his burlesque novel (Gone Wrong, by Miss Rhody Dendron) later appeared in book form with a cover design by Linley Sam- bourne. To Punch, also, Du Maurier con- tributed portraits of “splendid ugly men”. And these are jests of honor, tributes to her popularity. The novels are not in the least absurd, and the reader today will laugh and cry in the right places.
The best comment on her own early fic- tions Miss Broughton supplied herself when
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an old woman (she died in 1920). So, at any rate, I take her last story, A Fool in Her Folly, to be. In this posthumous tale it seems to me she deliberately showed the other side of the medal. Surely there have crept some memories from the past into her half satiric, half sympathetic portrait of Charlotte. It is just such a novel as Not Wisely But Too Well that Charlotte in her enthusiastic inno- cence embarks upon, and the manuscript of which so shocks her parents that they burn it, and she has to write it all over again from memory. “Love” is the title of Charlotte’s work, a volcanic love her theme, and her hero a dark, passion-scarred man. This hero, when half way through the second version of her novel, she meets in the flesh. Bill Drink- water is Colonel Stamer of Not Wisely But Too Well reduced to reality. Like Stamer, like the hero of Charlotte’s own novel, Bill is a black sheep, but there is this important difference in Miss Broughton’s new present- ment of the type, that his failings are no longer veiled in a romantic glamour, but par- ticularized. Bill was expelled from Eton; a similar result followed when he was sent to an Army tutor in Yorkshire; and his later career has been marked by a trail of unsavory episodes. Upon Charlotte, however, the true significance of these vulgar little affairs is lost. She bathes her lover in the transforming light of imagination and through his passion for her sees him achieving redemption. Alas, this time the sheep really is black; so far from ennobling her hero, poor Charlotte, having kept a tryst with him at a lonely shanty on the Downs, narrowly escapes a worse mis- fortune than the disillusionment in which her grand passion ends.
“Rhoda,” says Mr. Percy Lubbock, “to the end of her life, wore an air of the eighteen- seventies. Myself I have seen her, a genera- tion later, with a trailing gown and a para- sol and a croquet-mallet, contriving to wield all three at once with effect; and though it was difficult to think that she was the crea- tor of her gushing Joans and Nancies and Be-
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lindas, she evidently came to us from their time and place; and if she hadn’t written her novels she had lived in them, in that high- coloured England of big houses and big meals and big families.” Certainly the big houses and big meals and big families form part of the charm of the novels. The very ap- pearance of these, with their steel-engraved frontispieces, carries us back to a more home- ly, more leisurely, mellower age. 1 can my- self, or so I fancy, recall it—not dimly, but brokenly—in such isolated pictures as impress themselves usually quite inexplicably on a child’s mind; for that age died slowly, and more slowly I dare say in Ireland than in England. There are no crinolines in my pic- tures (nor for that matter in Rhoda’s), which are of the mid-eighties, but there are crino- lettes and parasols and spotted veils and small toque-like hats and trailing gowns, all in my mind still inextricably bound up with earli- est visions of feminine beauty; and it was thus that Miss Broughton’s heroines were at- tired. I confess I admire them. I admire the world they lived in. If I could I would sweep away nearly every invention of the interven- ing years—motor-cars, wireless, aeroplanes, movies, talkies, retaining only the guileless gramophone, and even that I would sacrifice to be rid of the rest. The frontispieces to the novels seem to me charming; I have an af- fection for big houses, while anyone who has been brought up in one must know that big families are the best. Miss Broughton’s is the “county” world, and I like that too. Probably there are London scenes in her books but I do not remember them; for me the novels have a countrified and familiar aspect I would gladly linger over.
The career of W. E, Norris began thirteen years later than that of Rhoda Broughton. There were no novels by Norris in our house, and I have forgotten how I procured Miss Shafto, A Bachelor's Blunder, Major and Minor and the rest. But they were in Bent- ley’s list, and for me that was sufficient; never can a publisher have inspired greater faith.
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Here there can be no doubt about origins: whatever value we may set on the achieve- ment, it is plain that Norris got his idea of the novel from Thackeray. His fiction is the fiction of a man of the world, well-bred, de- tached, not taking himself or his work over- seriously, deploring, rather, any emphatic dis- play of emotion; amused, at times mildly cynical, but always kindly. He tells a story, of course, but it is as little startling as he can make it and there is only just enough of it to hold together an easy-going comedy of manners. Norris does not invariably end his fable with a wedding, but tragedy is as little in his line as mystery or melodrama. What he chiefly relies on is his lightness of touch, and this is particularly happy in his drawing of those idle, clever young good-for-nothings, who constitute by far the most amusing por- traits in his gallery. We cannot call them heroes, these young gentlemen of expensive tastes and slender, if any, means, whose en- gaging imperturbability and deplorable mor- als enliven the pages of Norris’s best novels. Probably they really are villains, for they live by their wits and on their friends—sometimes, alas, their friends of the opposite sex. More- over they are utterly selfish; their intelli- gence, their wit and their graces of person and manner being employed solely to gain their own disreputable ends. In spite of this, the charm they exercise upon long-suffering relatives and friends is completely convinc- ing, because we feel it ourselves. They have a playful, ironic humor which passes easily into insolence when nothing is to be gained by politeness. On the other hand, they never indulge in self-pity, never whine when mis- fortune overtakes them, never lose their com- posure in the most trying circumstances. They take risks and abide by their luck. They are not in the end allowed to triumph, but even when detected and exposed they have a de- lightful habit of leaving the virtuous both looking and feeling extremely foolish. Philip, in No New Thing, whose fortunes we follow from early boyhood till his mar-
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riage with Signora Tommasini, the great operatic contralto, fat, passée, good-natured, nearly old enough to be his grandmother, but with heaps of money, is a typical Norris youth. His career is little more edifying than that of Mr. George Moore’s “modern lover”, but then he is so much more tolerable as a man, and so infinitely more amusing as a companion. We feel his attractiveness, where- as we have to take Lewis Seymour’s for granted, since it depends apparently entirely on his good looks.
Norris wrote, however, with an always dangerous and eventually disastrous facility. Possibly the rate of his production did not exceed that of Anthony Trollope, but his range was very much narrower and his tal- ent far less robust. He never lost a certain grace of manner, but he forced his gift and his early liveliness failed under the strain of over-production. Thirlby Hall, The Rogue, Adrian Vidal, No New Thing—he wrote, I dare say, a score of novels as good or nearly as good as these, and perhaps another score that do not fall immeasurably below them, but the four I have mentioned contain every- thing that will be found in the rest. They are, I suppose, what used to be described as “so- ciety novels”. For the more familiar picture of English middle-class life we may turn to F. Anstey’s two serious novels, The Giant's Robe and The Pariah.
Or rather to one of them, for though The Giant’s Robe has some delightful humor and a tragic and exciting plot, it is of the later book I really wish to speak, tragic and en- thralling also, but with a tragedy more subtle and a plot less in evidence. The Pariah is an admirable novel, standing far above the aver- age fiction of both its day and ours, far too good to be forgotten. The portrait of Allen Chadwick, the loutish, undersized, unedu- cated, uncomely, cockney youth, who wakes up one day to find himself a rich man’s son, is a delicate and beautiful study, to some ex- tent anticipating that of Kipp. But all the circumstances of the story are different, and
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Allen’s temperament is less adaptable and more sensitive. He is transplanted in an en- vironment where he is disliked and looked down upon; blundering, by no means clever the innate kindness and generosity of his nature are belied at every turn by his unfor- tunate speech, manner and appearance. Hec- tored and bullied by a coarse-grained father (who desires to make a gentleman of him while not understanding very clearly what a gentleman is, and to this end has married an aristocratic but impecunious widow who, with an eye to the advancement of her own brood is careful, beneath a veil of apparent sym- pathy, to keep her stepson’s shortcomings con- stantly in view), despised and disliked by his stepbrothers and sisters, Allen in the end is turned adrift; the cuckoo tactics succeed; the pariah is eliminated. The tragedy is quiet, with from the first a kind of hopelessness in it; and for all its pathos there is never a false note of sentimentality. I do not know that the novel attracted any particular attention. It was not what was expected, and therefore probably aroused disappointment. Mr. Anstey had the bad luck to write in his first story a book which was ever afterwards to be as- sociated with his name, so that no matter what new ground he broke up, to the public he remained and still remains the author of Vice-Versa. I can think of no other explana- tion for the neglect of his later books. After all, Tourmalin’s Time Cheques is quite as original and amusing as Vice-Versa. So are Under the Rose, The Travelling Compan- ions, and all that series of stories in scene and dialogue beginning with Voces Populi and ending with Lyre and Lancet.
With the exceptions of those two master- pieces, The New Arabian Nights and The Twilight of the Gods, Mr. Anstey’s are the only experiments in the fantastic I can recall belonging to the eighties. Vice-Versa, The Tinted Venus, A Fallen Idol, Tourmalin’s Time Cheques—these endearing tales, in which the quaintness of the situations is ex- quisitely opposed to the realism of the talk
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and characterization, act upon one’s spirits like sunshine upon a barometer. They are true flowers of the comic genius, and each is, into the bargain, the work of a born story-teller. Observation, invention, an ex- quisite sense of human absurdity, and a gift for writing dialogue with a mimetic skill that creates the very illusion of the speaking voice —all these qualities have kept them as fresh today as when they were first presented to the reading world.
In the pastoral novel, close to the soil, we breathe the very smell of England. Here, in the works of Thomas Hardy, we find the English genius, a little earthy perhaps, but spontaneous, strong, triumphant, in its su- preme gift of poetry. And in the work of those less famous writers with whom I am alone concerned, there is an equally strong local flavor. There are flashes of poetry in the novels of Richard Jefferies, Greene Ferne Farm, Amaryllis at the Fair, The Dewy Morn, though all three are failures. Jefferies, in truth, apart from his power of description, was but poorly equipped as a novelist. He had little gift for creating character, little in- ventive power, little sense of construction, and his technique was more artless even than that of most of his contemporaries. He wrote one masterpiece, Bevis; but Bevis was a book about boys, a dream of his own boyhood, everything in which sprang from memory, a love of nature, and an inexhaustible joy and patience in noting the details of the natural scene. And even Bevis he did his best to spoil by the last chapters. But it seems to me to be the best book about boys ever written, with the possible excepttOn of Huckleberry Finn: in fact, in its own line, I believe it to be unsurpassable. At the same time I feel much less certain that it is the best boys’ book.
It was the only story Jefferies ever wrote into which he was able to put his whole heart. He was far more interested in the building of the raft, the exploration of the lake, the lessons in swimming and sailing,
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than in the love business of his grown-up fictions. Greene Ferne Farm, published in 1880, is typical of these. It is a short novel, less than three hundred pages of big print; it contains a few beautiful passages and two or three good chapters; but Jefferies’s indi- vidual note, the note that is carried so de- lightfully right through Bevis, sounds only
intermittently.
Mr. Ruck, very big and burly, was shaped something like one of his own mangolds turned upside down: that is to say, as the glance ran over his figure, beginning at the head, it took in a swelling outline as it proceeded lower. He was clad in a snowy-white smock-frock, breeches and gaiters, and glossy beaver hat.
This costume had a hieroglyphic meaning. The snowy-white smock-frock intimated that he had risen from lowly estate, and was proud of the fact. The breeches and gaiters gave him an air of respectable antiquity in itself equiv- alent to a certain standing. Finally the beaver hat—which everybody in the parish knew cost a guinea, and nothing less—bespoke the thou- sand pounds at the bank to which he so fre- quently alluded.
“Hur be a upstanding girl, that Margaret Estcourt. A’ got a thousand pound under the will.”
“And the Greene Ferne Farm when the widder goes.”
“Five hundred acres housen in the town.”
“A’ be a featish-looking girl, you.”
“So be May Fisher; but a’ bean’t such a queen as tother. Margaret walks as if the parish belonged to her.”
“If a’ did, her would sell un, and buy a new bonnet. . . .”
frechold, and them
The sound of singing came from the open door under the tower hard by.
“Dall’d if it bean’t ‘I will arise.’ ”
“°S’pose us had better go in.”
In such passages can we not hear the echo of another voice, that of the author of Under the Greenwood Tree? Those chapters, too, in which Margaret and Geoffrey, the undeclared lovers, are lost on the Downs at night, might
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have been conceived by Hardy. They find shelter in an ancient tomb or dolmen, and possibly it is this which recalls the scene, written more than ten years later, where Angel Clare and Tess flee from justice across Salisbury Plain. True, no cloud of doom hangs over Jefferies’s lovers, no ironical Presi- dent of the Immortals makes sport of them; it is only that both scenes impress upon us the same sense of a vast lonely space and of immemorial time in contrast with the pitiful fragility of human lives.
In the same year, 1880, there had appeared a much more remarkable novel of rural life. Baring-Gould’s half-forgotten tale, Mehalah, if not a great book is at least a memorable one. It would be memorable if for nothing else than that the author of it is, I suppose, Emily Bronté’s only disciple. In its subject, in its principal characters, in its conception of love as a kind of spiritual or demoniac ob- session, in its violence, in its wild and lonely setting, Mehalah inevitably reminds us of Wuthering Heights. The likeness, indeed, if it forms part of the book’s fascination is also its misfortune. Mehalah is powerfully writ- ten; set it among any group of novels of the better class and it will stand out as a bold, striking and picturesque work; the one comparison it cannot survive is the compari- son it forces us to make.
On its own plane, however, Mehalah is worthy to survive. The time is 1780 or there- abouts, the scene the glittering, desolate Es- sex salt marshes, the subject a passionate and unrequited love. How far Elijah Rebow, con- sciously or unconsciously, may have been derived from Heathcliff does not matter. He never appears to us as a kind of dark fallen angel (and how far that aspect depended on the fact that Emily Bronté was in love with her hero it would be useless to seek, though one can guess that under a certain type of examination he would emerge as the pro- jection of a repression). Rebow, if he was suggested by Heathcliff, nevertheless is not Heathcliff: much less is Mehalah Catherine
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Earnshaw; and the author’s realization of his characters remains throughout clear and consistent. Rebow is as violent and ruthless as Heathcliff, as constant in his love, while the passion that consumes him is as absorb- ing and as clean as Heathcliff’s, spiritualized, one might think, by its very intensity. He rants at times, but so does Heathcliff. Both are ready to commit any action that may bring them nearer to their heart’s desire; both are revengeful, implacable and in most directions unscrupulous. And Mehalah is Rebow’s soul-mate as Cathy is Heathcliff’s. But a sharp divergence here is given to the march of the drama, for Mehalah hates and defies Rebow, and loves the worthless, easy- going George. To get the girl into his power Rebow sticks at nothing. He betrays Me- hala’s lover to the press gang, robs her and her widowed mother, plots against them, buys up their impoverished farm, burns the house down over their heads and finally, by lying, scheming, and violence, gets them be- neath his own roof at Red Hall. This gaunt red-brick house, standing bare and bleak and lonely above the level of the marsh, with- out a tree to shelter it, and where, in the cellars under the paved floor, Rebow keeps his maniac brother chained like a wild beast —this house is in itself a Bronté conception. The whole theme of the book might well have scared off anybody but a Bronté, and by what miracle it escapes melodrama I do not know. That it does escape it, however, is I think unquestionable. And the story un- rolls itself before us against a background of water and sky. The smell of the sea is in it, the brown salt weed drying on the flats, the sound of oars and of boats being launched and beached, the cry of wild duck and cur- lew, now and then the report of a gun; and though it is not a tale of smugglers and we are not told of a single cargo that is run, smuggling somehow is going on all round us.
Mehalah was a rather odd book for a par- son to have written, even though he did not intend to sign it. Where rustic religion is
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concerned the tone if not cynical is com- pletely disillusioned:
Mrs. de Wit was a moralist, and when nearly drunk religious.
“T always make a point to believe the worst. I’m a religious person, and them as sets up to be religious always does that.”
The “dearly beloveds” met in the Lord’s house every Lord’s day to acknowledge their “erring and straying like lost sheep,” and make ap- pointments for erring and straying again.
There is not the slightest attempt to point a moral, to preach or to pray. The attitude to women is to say the least unflattering, and such an episode as that of the curate’s chil- dren and the bat is in the spirit if not the manner of Mr. T. F. Powys.
Just one more book I should like to men- tion because it has never, I think, met with anything like the appreciation it deserves. It was published in 1887, appearing first anonymously in Temple Bar, and then in a single slender dark blue volume. (I am end- ing up, you see, fittingly if quite uninten- tionally, with yet another Bentley book:— “that wise old publisher”, as Miss Corelli called him when he accepted A Romance of Two Worlds.) A Village Tragedy, by Mar- garet L. Woods, is a realistic pastoral novel, but it is a work of infinite delicacy, written in a simple lucid prose that is in itself a joy, rare then and rare today. The tragic plot is simple as the writing, the characters lowly (the hero almost inarticulate), but in spite of its gloomy shadows there is a beauty in this love tale that approaches the idyllic. Beauty and sadness alike spring in some measure from the youth of the lovers, their pathetic inexperience if not innocency, for Annie and Jesse are really little more than children when they are thrown into each other’s arms—Annie the farm drudge, and
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Jesse the workhouse boy, now working on a farm too. The disaster is not of their making; it is the result of the cruelty, prurience and stupidity of their elders, for there has been nothing but friendship between them when the girl in the middle of the night is dragged out of bed and thrust out of doors by her suspicious and half-drunken aunt and mis- tress. She seeks shelter, naturally enough, in the boy’s cottage; but it is an unfortunate step, and her aunt sees to it that it shall be irretrievable. It may be objected that in the misinformation that prevents Annie and Jesse from getting married, in Jesse’s long illness, and in the railway accident which kills him just when at last there seems to be a chance of happiness, there is a hint of the arbitrary. Still, the little book remains of a rare distinc- tion, and takes rank amongst our very finest pastoral novels.
Like Mehalah, it is among those that should, if out of print, be reprinted. A Vil- lage Tragedy, The Pariah, Mehalah—if 1 were re-issuing a selection of novels of the eighties I should begin with these three. But I should not end there: there are others—at least a score—whose ghosts would haunt me reproachfully if I did. Fifty years! A man considers himself only middle-aged at fifty, yet for a book it is far beyond the allotted span. The thought might well awaken in the most self-confident author a mood of chas- tened melancholy. Luckily youth is un- troubled with such thoughts or I dare say nobody would think it worth the trouble to begin to write, which would be a pity. It is only when we sce the books we ourselves have once so enjoyed—or perhaps even writ- ten—dropping into oblivion, that a spirit of tenderness towards the past is aroused. Let us cultivate it, without neglecting the pres- ent. It may one day—who knows?—breathe some faint friendly whisper among our own
dry bones.
THE MEANING OF ROUSSEAU
by Robert Shafer
t was high time we had a reasonable book about Rousseau!” exclaimed an English reviewer, not long ago, and proceeded to
hail Professor Wright’s small volume* as meeting this requirement “admirably”. This was something for Morningside Heights; and something, even more, for Professor Wright. And no one, surely, can read his book with- out admiration for its form. It is the result of much study, patient analysis, long medita- tion—yet it is brief, simple, clear, and goes to the center of those perennial and supreme- ly important questions which Rousseau at- tempted to answer, It is, too, a book of honest purpose, the more persuasive just because one is constantly made to feel that its author did, in the first instance, attempt to approach his vexed subject dispassionately and without prejudice.
Moreover, no one is likely to question the need of such a treatise as Professor Wright has aimed at. His purpose is simply to tell us what Rousseau meant to say, as “a long perusal of his work” has led him to under- stand Rousseau’s real intention. That this should be still a deeply unsettled problem, a century and a half after the Genevan’s death, may be sufficiently odd, and disturbing, but will not be doubted by anyone at all fa- miliar with Rousseau’s books, with the vast body of criticism which has grown up around
*The Meaning of Rousseau, by Ernest Hunter Wright. Oxford, (My quotation is from The Times Literary Supplement.)
them, and with the diversity and extent of the man’s influence, not only throughout the nineteenth century, but pervading our con- temporary life and thought. Rousseauism con- tinues to be with us, unabated, unescapable. If it is no longer a potent force in the recent imaginative literature of Europe and Amer- ica, it remains the informing soul of much that we all read; it has gone far to shape the popular religion which prevailingly is being preached in our time; it is at the center of nearly all our thought about government and social life; and, as Professor Wright truly says, it “has had a far greater influence than any other educational theory”, and “with all its ideality it is at least practical enough to have become the main foundation for the schools and colleges in nearly all the world to-day”. Yet, at the same time, Rousseau him- self remains a center of bitter controversy, so that it is hard indeed to judge whether or not many of his zealous followers have betrayed their master or have propagated the true gos- pel. Hence any book which purports to an- swer this question fairly and disinterestedly merits serious attention and, in fact, tacitly claims a position of central importance in contemporary literature.
Professor Wright’s book, however, it must be said regretfully, does not make good its claim, Alas for excellent intentions! They are everywhere evident in this volume, but their presence makes it only the more gravely mis- leading. For it is the work of one who has
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come to idolize his subject, and who cannot rest content until he has persuaded us that Jean-Jacques is the great father of all which is generally thought to be good in the mod- ern world, that he was a profound philoso- pher whose wisdom is self-consistent and lays bare the ultimate truth about ourselves and our institutions, and that all save a blessed few of his multitudinous critics have been merely blind or malicious or corrupt in their refusal to understand his real meaning.
It is not difficult to see how one thing led to another. Professor Wright must early have discovered in himself that famous, that pe- culiar “sixth and moral sense with which so few hearts are endowed, and without which no person whatever”, as Rousseau assured him, could understand the sentiments of his. Guided by this infallible organ, he saw that Rousseau’s intentions throughout his life were always good, and concluded that to understand his real meaning it was necessary to pierce through surface difficulties to the un- derlying intention. And to grasp this and ex- plain it, of course, was tantamount to pro- claiming its excellence. When he read in the Social Contract, “All my ideas are consistent, but I cannot expound them all at once”, he saw readily what this meant. When hope- lessly inconsistent assertions were made, clearly Rousseau could not have meant both of them. He must have meant only the “good” one—consistent, to a reverent mind, with his other “good” assertions—and it be- came straightway “preposterous” to imagine that he might really have meant what he said whenever it was “bad”.* Thus it became ob- viously impossible “to believe that any man so humble and so reverent” as the Savoyard Vicar could really have expounded a religious faith which was “only the expansion of his own soul”.t Hence the conclusion of the most competent and thorough of all students of Rousseau’s religion was lightly dismissed to enable Mr. Wright to pursue his chosen
* See pp. 10-11. +See pp. 155-156.
way untroubled.* And much else was dis- missed, in accordance with a principle frankly mentioned in connection with Rousseau’s idea of the education proper to females. “If we are dealing with the Rousseau who is still alive in our day,” we are told, “we may omit all further reference to” subjects which he has dealt with unhappily.t This principle, of course, materially facilitated the general con- clusions summarized above. And thus Pro- fessor Wright came to the end of his dis- interested inquiry.
My description, I am aware, will sound like a parody of critical method. That is not my wish; but it would appear to be the inevitable result, in this case, of attempting to state the facts briefly. The development itself must have been very slow, carrying Mr. Wright imperceptibly, and all honestly, into a pro- cedure which he would himself doubtless characterize, in any other connection, as fan- tastic, but for which he might well plead, in this case, the necessity that knows no rules. The difficulties were so great! and his own intentions were unimpeachable. And, besides, he did keep his head—he did express himself moderately, and did remember that Rousseau was not a man to be glorified, and did take into account not only the seeming but the real contradictions in his books;—above all, he did admit that despite his efforts he had not finally been able to weld Rousseau’s doc- trines into a perfect unity. This is quite true —and yet quite negligible; for his circumspec- tion did not at all prevent Professor Wright from falling into the critical method I have described. Circumspection served only to dis- guise that method and render it plausible, with the consequence that this book takes its place unescapably beside those which Jules
*P. M. Masson, La Religion de ]. J. Rousseau, Il, 120: “Il ne s’agit point de se perdre en Dieu, mais plutét d’absorber Dieu en soi. ... Dans le paradis de Jean-Jacques, Dieu lui-méme s’effacera discrétement pour laisser place a Jean-Jacques’. Mr. Wright acknowledges
the competence and thoroughness of Masson, and makes large use of his work, so far as he conveniently can.
tP. 64.
THE MEANING OF ROUSSEAU by ROBERT SHAFER
Lemaitre had in mind when he wrote: “It is really a pity that Rousseau’s best friends should constantly be forced, in their com- mentaries, to distinguish between what he afhirmed (which is often inept), and what he probably thought. They seem to reason thus: ‘The proof that what he said was not what he meant to say, is that its refutation would be too easy. A delicate mind does not judge him according to what he says; that would be too coarse’”.* But, Lemaitre continued, if you grant the contention, what is gained? For “this difference between the thought and the expression is nothing but charlatanism”. And from this charge I do not think Rousseau can possibly be cleared. Certainly Professor Wright does nothing to vindicate him. The following passages, I believe, completely set forth the nature of his attempt:
The idea that man must be perfected by his reason in accordance with his nature runs through all of Rousseau’s work and gives it an essential unity. . . . It is quite true that there are passages from him, most of them written when his thought was struggling into birth, which seem to contradict [this idea]. Far too much has been made of them. ... We shall find that most of them will harmonize with what we have been saying if we will but make sure of their intention instead of tripping over their terms. Perhaps some of them will remain irreconcilable. But so much was expected at the start. Rousseau was not a man to leave all trim; he was a man to make the most of the idea immediately before him rather than to shape it into careful consonance with all the other ideas in his mind. And while he is not utterly unique in this, we have shown that he is ca-
*“Close your Lemaitre, and open your Contract,” says Mr. Wright; and he cites Lemaitre’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau some five times only as a prominent example of the vile and partisan compositions all too usual amongst books on Rousseau. This is fair enough; the book is frankly partisan, and extreme in its hostility. At the same time, however, it is the work of a talented man of letters, and contains many a keen and true ob- servation (like the one above quoted) which Mr. Wright could have pondered with profit. The student, in fact, if he had to choose between the two, would gain a far
truer and better rounded conception of Rousseau from Lemaitre than from Mr. Wright.
595 pable upon occasion of throwing off a phrase which can all too easily be wrested from the main intention of his work and even urged against it. .. . For Rousseau [is a rhetorician, and] has the dubious gift of epigram, and loves to fling off now and then a kind of paradox that remains unforgettable when all the context that explains and mitigates it is forgotten. Thus every one remembers his saying that “the man who thinks is a degenerate animal”; and only too often that paradox and a few others like it have been taken for the head and front of his philosophy.*
There we are: Rousseau was a great think- er, amongst the most profound, but a slovenly one; and he could never resist the temptation to shock, even when it was completely against his real purpose—even when he thus said just the opposite of what he meant. And these say- ings, we must kindly remember, are but few, and are merely rhetorical flourishes. Is there any other man known to history, for whom equal claims have been made, who has had thus to be defended? I think not. It is really but a step, one will observe, from this to the conclusion of M. Maritain: “Let us not re- proach him. The ‘Father of the modern world’ is an irresponsible. These contradic- tions are not in the least calculated”. Here, however, we are on firm ground again. For I think everyone not rendered desperate by an impossible task would agree that Rous- seau’s manner of expression is part and parcel of the man. As he spoke, so he was—a crea- ture all compound of irritable sensibility, with the intense though often shallow feeling of his kind, continually exasperated by his con- tacts with life, always expecting much and always receiving little, timid in action and bold in imagination, for ever impelled to overreach himself, extreme in all things, yet satisfied with none. And Professor Wright’s apology for him is a double failure: it does not meet, but seeks only to minimize, the ac- cusation that there was in him a strain of charlatanism, while it evades the major and significant contradictions in his writings to
*Pp. 32, 30, 3-4.
506
explain the merely notorious ones by the claim that Rousseau’s literary style is a thing apart, separable from the man and his real meaning, and should be disregarded by the fair-minded critic.
The claim is necessary, I should suppose, if Rousseau is now to be presented to the world as a great and fundamentally consistent thinker. And with the death of romanticism such an effort was to be expected. It labors, however, under fatal difficulties, of which the transparently illegitimate attempt to disre- gard Rousseau’s manner of expression is per- haps the least.
Consider, for example, the problem of con- science, of “that sixth and moral sense with which so few hearts are endowed”. Rousseau assures us solemnly that it is a primordial gift, bound up in the original constitution of every human being, and an “infallible judge of good and evil, making man like to God”. It alone raises man above the beasts—“an in- nate principle of justice and virtue, by which, in spite of our maxims, we judge our own actions or those of others to be good or evil”. Because of this principle implanted “in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface”, “I need only consult myself with regard to what I wish to do; what I feel to be right is right, what I feel to be wrong is wrong; conscience is the best casuist; and it is only when we haggle with conscience that we have recourse to the subtleties of argument. Our first duty is towards ourself; yet how often does the voice of others tell us that in seeking our own good at the expense of others we are do- ing ill? We think we are following the guid- ance of nature, and we are resisting it; we listen to what she says to our senses, and we neglect what she says to our heart; the active being obeys, the passive commands, Con- science is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. Is it strange that these voices often contradict each other? And then to which should we give heed? Too often does reason deceive us; we have only
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too good a right to doubt her; but conscience never deceives us; she is the true guide of man; it is to the soul what instinct is to the body; he who obeys his conscience is follow- ing nature and he need not fear that he will go astray”.
These sentences from the Savoyard Vicar’s creed are clear enough, and further quotation would only show that they fairly represent Rousseau’s belief. But what are we to make of them when elsewhere in Emile we read that “Reason alone teaches us to know good and evil. Therefore conscience, which makes us love the one and hate the other, though it is independent of reason, cannot develop without it. Before the age of reason we do good or ill without knowing it, and there is no morality in our actions, although there is sometimes in our feeling with regard to other people’s actions in relation to ourselves”,
In each of these accounts Rousseau, to be sure, has the other in mind, and the Savoyard Vicar has a little formula for harmonizing them. “To know good,” he says, “is not to love it; this knowledge is not innate in man; but as soon as his reason leads him to per- ceive it, his conscience impels him to love it; it is this feeling which is innate.” The harmony here, of course, is merely for the eye or ear, not for the mind. This is simply a species of verbal trickery which does nothing to bridge the chasm between the two pas- sages quoted above. And this is not all; for what is Rousseau’s conception of reason? How does it enable us to distinguish between good and evil?
In Emile there are a number of passages concerning the nature of reason which are clear as far as they go. From them we learn that it “is only the power to compare and judge” “precepts or ideas”. What Rousseau calls “the reasoning of the senses” “consists in the formation of simple ideas through the associated experience of several sensations”; and what he calls “the reasoning of the intel- lect consists in the formation of complex ideas through the association of several simple
THE MEANING OF ROUSSEAU by ROBERT SHAFER
ideas”. This is the nature of reason. But we learn further that man is not born with this art or power, which is merely an instrument serving his needs, and called into being by them as they develop. Man is born with a single passion, self-love, which never leaves him. “This passion is primitive, instinctive; it precedes all the rest, which are in a sense only modifications of it.” Rousseau nowhere, so far as I know, gives what purports to be a full list of “the rest” as they appear in the “natural” man, nor, indeed, any list which he does not elsewhere contradict at some point. However, the following list is, I be- lieve, as fairly representative of his uncertain opinion as it is possible to make it. Amongst the “natural” derivatives or modifications of self-love are: compassion or sympathy, fear, pain, the dread of death, the desire for com- fort, the desire for health, the desire for free- dom, the desire for food, for a female, and for sleep. Reason, then, is the servant of self- love and of its “natural” modifications; and, like other servants, is undependable, un- trustworthy, liable to all manner of mistakes.
In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequal- ity we learn further that “it is by the ac- tivity of the passions that our reason is improved; for we desire knowledge only be- cause we wish to enjoy; and it is impossible to conceive any reason why a person who has neither fears nor desires should give him- self the trouble of reasoning. The passions, again, originate in our wants, and their progress depends on that of our knowledge; for we cannot desire or fear anything, ex- cept from the idea we have of it, or from the simple impulse of nature”, “In all the na- tions of the world the progress of the under- standing has been exactly proportionate to the wants which the peoples had received from nature, or been subjected to by circumstances, and in consequence to the passions that in- duced them to provide for those necessities.”
Reason, being the servant of our wants, de- veloping in proportion as these multiply, min- isters always ultimately to self-love. It may,
507 however, be guilty, when sufficiently sharp- ened and refined, of usurpation—and then it becomes an instrument of evil. “When I see a man in love with knowledge, yielding to its charms and flitting from one branch to another unable to stay his steps, he seems to me like a child gathering shells on the sea- shore, now picking them up, then throwing them aside for others which he sees beyond them, then taking them again, till over- whelmed by their number and unable to choose between them, he flings them all away and returns empty handed.” The lover of knowledge, supposing that he makes no mis- takes and imposes none on others, is frivol- ous perhaps rather than positively evil, and harms chiefly himself; but his degeneration leads directly to a far worse development—it leads to philosophy, which perverts man from his “natural” goodness and fills the world with error. “It is reason that engenders self-respect, and reflection that confirms it; it is reason which turns man’s mind back upon itself, and divides him from everything that could disturb or afflict him. It is phi- losophy that isolates him, and bids him say, at sight of the misfortunes of others: ‘Perish if you will, I am secure’. Nothing but such general evils as threaten the whole com- munity can disturb the tranquil sleep of the philosopher, or tear him from his bed. A murder may with impunity be committed under his window; he has only to put his hands to his ears and argue a little with himself, to prevent nature, which is shocked within him, from identifying itself with the unfortunate sufferer.” Further, “the chief source of human error is to be found in gen- eral and abstract ideas; the jargon of meta- physics has never led to the discovery of any single truth, and it has filled philosophy with absurdities of which we are ashamed as soon as we strip them of their long words”. And the seriousness of this indictment will be realized when we remember that it is error, and never ignorance, which is the source of all the evils of our life.
508
Reason, we thus see, when it outstrips its proper office, becomes a potent, a devastating source of evil; and when kept to its proper work it is the fallible but useful instrument of self-love. In Rousseau’s opinion it does not develop far so long as man remains “natural”, but becomes powerful in improv- ing both the individual and his material cir- cumstances only when man’s wants or pas- sions have crossed the fatal line beyond which they are no longer “natural”. This ad- mitted improvement, however, is attended by abuses so great that, in order to achieve it, man is often degraded below the level of animal existence. And his only remedy is the establishment of conventions, dictated by en- lightened self-interest, yet so absolute in their enforcement that they may have the char- acter of natural laws. A society so organized would be “unnatural”, like the individuals composing it, but it would have the advan- tage of preserving to men the benefits of passing beyond their “natural” state by giv- ing their actions—through the conventions just mentioned—“the morality they had for- merly lacked”. This is the method of banish- ing the evils created by man’s developed social life and civilization which Rousseau proposed in the Soctal Contract.
The problem of conscience, like most prob- lems started by Rousseau, has led us a long chase, and would take us farther—with, how- ever, no different result. Rousseau, as every- body knows, felt the inadequacy of the narrow rationalism of his time, though he also fell inevitably and strongly under its influence. Thus he gave the primacy, not to reason, but to passion, in his account of man’s fundamental constitution. Yet he did not dispense with reason, though he evidently wished to, more than once. Instead, he made it the useful servant of the passions. And in this capacity reason could and did distinguish between good and evil of a certain kind. It was not infallible—quite the contrary—but when it worked successfully it enabled man to choose, in any given circumstances, the
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best course to follow in satisfying his needs, This was the “good” which man could come rationally to know—how to secure food when he was hungry, how to secure warmth when he was cold, how to make life easy, safe, and comfortable. But man could not go far in the pursuit of such “good” with- out bringing evils in the train of his achieve- ments which Rousseau thought to be worse than bestial. Hence he devised the plan set forth in the Social Contract, to enable each member of a community securely to satisfy his own needs, in so far as this did not interfere with any other member’s satisfac- tion of Ais needs. The conventions worked out to this end would be “unnatural”, but would be the logical goal towards which the use of reason pointed, and would con- stitute a prudential or utilitarian morality. And thus finally reason would enable man to distinguish moral good from moral evil, though continuing to work as the instrument of self-love.
But where, still, is conscience? Nowhere, to speak plainly. Rousseau’s reason could never by any possibility tell his conscience what to love, what to abhor; as, indeed, he himself recognized explicitly enough when he was actually immersed in thought about conscience. Later he did try to find a place for conscience in his general account of human nature: having derived sympathy from the father of all the passions, self-love, he then pointed out that these two must conflict with each other on occasion, and proclaimed that conscience was a third pas- sion born of this conflict.* But to make con- science thus the grand-daughter of self-love,
* Professor Wright accepts this disposal of conscience without the slightest indication of awareness that there is any difficulty in it. Perhaps, if questioned, he would say what he says in answer to one of Morley’s objec- tions to the Savoyard Vicar’s religion. Morley complained (very pertinently, as we shall see) that “a subjective test necessarily proves anything that any man desires’. Mr. Wright answers: “Rousseau does not believe” it! (pp. 155-156.) This might be unobjectionable, though ab- surd enough, were we confronted, with fair warning, by a plain, completely uncritical exposition of Rousseau’s
THE MEANING OF ROUSSEAU by ROBERT SHAFER
and so one of the passions which “are the voice of the body” will not fill the bill. The trouble is not merely that conscience has been deliberately and eloquently defined as the voice of the soul, or heart, opposed to the passions which “are the voice of the body”; it is also that, as Rousseau was at times willing to admit, the derivatives or modifica- tions of self-love could never come into fundamental conflict with that ultimate pas- sion, and that reason remained always its servant. And we have seen that in this capacity reason, as it developed, became fer- tile in devising evil under the guise of “good”—moral evil, that is, issuing from the individual’s intelligent procedure in satisfy- ing his wants.
There is, indeed, no way out. Rousseau’s conscience is something ultimate, absolute, sufficient to itself, superior to his reason, op- posed to his reason. It cannot possibly be connected with his “natural” man. There is, in fact, a fundamental break between his “natural religion” and his “natural man”, nor is the problem of conscience the only sign of it, though it is perhaps the most striking one. Nor, again, is this incoherence, though important, an isolated exception to Rousseau’s general achievement as a thinker. On the contrary, it is characteristic. Emile fairly bristles with logical difficulties, and the Social Contract no less. In the “good” society “each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody”. On precisely the same principle, the magistrate, being responsible to all, is responsible to nobody. Hence his rule is illegitimate, and his subjects, if they do not violently depose him, are the slaves of a
writings—and, indeed, something of this sort is actually promised. But we have already seen that the promise is not kept—is, in fact, only remembered when it may be used to Rousseau’s advantage. Even when it is being made it is ambiguous, leaving us doubtful whether the exposition is to concern itself with what Rousseau did say or with what he must certainly have intended to say. And as the book proceeds no pains are neglected to make the exposition’ a plausible basis for the highest claims in Rousseau’s behalf, which are plentifully made, and whose general drift has been indicated above.
509 tyrant—while, if they do depose him, they can only become the slaves of a new tyrant by the same process. This, of course, is not what Rousseau intended—but it is what, notoriously, he never knew how to avoid. His aim in the Social Contract was so to organize government as to preserve for the individual his “natural” freedom and his “ ” ~4 e
natural” equality with others under the con- ditions imposed by social life. To this end he candidly admitted that several miracles were requisite.* But, even with their aid, he could not avoid ending with a social organi- zation so absolute in its power and so ex- tended in its scope that under it the condition of the individual was only verbally dis- tinguishable from that of a slave. His apolo- gists have expended vast pains and endless argument upon the effort to help him out of this impasse, with not the slightest suc- cess.t And, in general, the attempt to dis- cover intellectual consistency in Rousseau’s writings is simply chimerical, and can end only in evasion and falsification.
Nowhere, moreover, is his inconsequence more significant and fundamental than in connection with “virtue”. It can be said without qualification, I believe, that every- where in his writings there is an insur- mountable gulf fixed between his “natural
*See Bk. II, Chap. 7, “The Legislator”.
+ The following sentences are from the General In- troduction to C. E. Vaughan’s definitive edition of The Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (I, 111- 112): “Socialist, in the strict sense, Rousseau was not; but he was collectivist, heart and soul. So far from being the charter of individualism, the Social Contract is a defiant statement of the collectivist ideal. . . . The only complaint to make is that he gives not too much, but too little, power to the individual; that, with the zeal of the new convert, he ruthlessly burns the idol he had once inconsiderately adored. It is on this side, not on the other, that his theory is open to attack. And the task that lay before subsequent thinkers was not to overthrow his ‘individualism’, but to bring his collec- tivism within bounds. . . . The ‘indivdual’, he argues, has no existence save in the imagination of the indi- vidualist. In himself, he is nothing but a ‘stupid and limited animal’; it is only in and through the State that he becomes ‘a reasoning being and a man’, It is to the
State that he owes his moral and intellectual being, his self and all that constitutes his individuality”.
510
man” and the morally good man. In Emile, in the Social Contract, in all of Rousseau’s thought, morality only makes its appearance, anomalously, after the “natural man” has somehow suffered the death of his “natural” parts. But what, then, becomes of the famous doctrine of “natural goodness”? It obviously meant a great deal to its author; at times it apparently meant everything to him; and upon it, more than upon anything else, his fame and influence have depended. Yet what, exactly, was the doctrine? Does the phrase, as Rousseau constantly uses it, have any single underlying meaning, which is con- nected with his account of man’s original endowments? If it does, it may mean that man, being born with certain needs, voiced by the passion of self-love and its modifica- tions, is also born with powers adequate to the satisfaction of these needs; so that the “natural man” is “good” for—that is, sufh- cient for—the real requirements of his orig- inal nature. He is perfectly self-sufficient, and in this sense is “beyond good and evil”; he is neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral.
This sometimes seems to be the real mean- ing; but at other times Rousseau clearly means something a little further removed from ordinary usage. He means that man’s inborn self-love is “good” in the sense that it is essential to the maintenance of life. If one were not endowed with this passion, one would not exert one’s self to keep on living, no matter how slight the requisite exertion. Hence man is “naturally good” in that he is well designed for self-preservation. And evidently this is a not illegitimate mean- ing, though one which is either totally in- different from the ethical standpoint or posi- tively unethical. For it answers nothing to the question whether or not self-preservation is ethically a good; and while, truly enough, practically all of us, with or without sufficient reason, suppose it to be a good, other things being equal, practically none of us supposes it to be a good under all circumstances and absolutely. Moreover, it will be remembered,
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
Rousseau allows a number of other passions, derivatives or modifications of self-love, to be equally “natural”; yet “natural goodness” in its present sense tends to become meaning- less if stretched to include all of these de- sires—that for freedom, for example, or health, or comfort. Is one to say that man’s inborn love of freedom is “good” because it is essential to the maintenance of a free life?—or is the difficulty obviated by saying, essential to the maintenance of a desirable life ?
No, circularity can be avoided only by stepping over into the ethical sphere, by say- ing that man’s inborn love of freedom is good because freedom is essential to the ethically good life. And in fact Rousseau does most often speak of “natural goodness” with an ethical implication, and does most often intend by it pretty much what the world has understood him to mean. But how can he do so consistently, or legitimately ?— and how can he give the phrase a variety of ethical implications constantly shifting and not always compatible with each other?
That he does so cannot be denied, and is not denied. And no answer whatever can be given to these questions by those who have imagined for themselves a philosophical Rousseau, save the egregious one that he did not really intend the greater number of the things he says. This is not to assert, however, that there is no answer, nor that there is no unity of any kind in Rousseau’s work. The solution of the problem is, indeed, simple enough, if only one is willing to accept all of the factors presented to us by the “Father of the modern world” in his work. And the one possible method of solving it is suggested in D. G. Ritchie’s brief conclusion: “When people appeal to ‘Nature’, they appeal arbi- trarily to what they happen to like or approve”.*
Rousseau constantly made this arbitrary appeal, with no calculated disingenuousness —with, in fact, the most intense and most
* Natural Rights, p. 69.
THE MEANING OF ROUSSEAU by ROBERT SHAFER
sincere feeling. And the bewildering variety of his approvals, the seeming recklessness and real inconsequence with which he joined together incommensurable propositions, finds its explanation precisely in this circumstance. What he liked and approved was determined by feeling. And the unity, such as it may be, of his writings is a unity of feeling. The man was a creature torn by irrepressible passion, grasping at any means of literary expression, careless of mere intellectual difficulties, bound to impress himself on the world by sheer force. And if we would understand his writ- ings we can only hope to do so by taking them for what they are—a species of lyrical ebullition—and by realizing that the key to them will never be discovered through any tortuous and sophistical “harmoniza- tions”, through any miracle of artful exegesis, but solely through study of the man. He sought to express Aimself;—we will learn what he meant whenever we become willing to recognize that his books are the expres- sion of himself. His books came into being, took the form we know clothing the sub- stance we know, not in spite of what he was, but just because he was the Jean-Jacques who lives still “in all the integrity of nature” in the Confessions.*
He himself wrote there his own best com- mentary. From those pages, and from them alone, we can learn with perfect certainty what “natural goodness” really meant to him, as the following passages show:
My master’s tyranny rendered insupportable that labor I should otherwise have loved, and drove me to vices I naturally despised, such as falsehood, idleness, and theft. . . . I love liberty,
* Professor Wright, like everybody else, makes use of some facts taken from the Confessions, but mentions the book only once; and then describes it, for the purpose of discrediting it, as a work “done under partial taint of madness in old age” (p. 33). This moved even his enthusiastic reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement to protest. And, for the rest, Mr. Wright summarily dis- misses the truth about his hero in one vague and skil- fully qualified allusion: “Rousseau is not a pleasant man, for one thing, though there may be good in him”
(p. 6).
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and I loathe constraint, dependence, and all their kindred annoyances....As nothing could be more opposite to my natural inclina- tion than this abominable meanness, I note it, to show there are moments of delirium when men ought not to be judged by their actions... . I had no companions to vitiate my morals: I became idle, careless, and obstinate, but my principles were not impaired. . . . Never was wickedness further from my thoughts, than in that cruel moment; and when I accused the unhappy girl, it is strange, but strictly true, that my friendship for her was the immediate cause of it. She was present to my thoughts; I formed my excuse from the first object that presented itself: I accused her with doing what I meant to have done, and as I designed to have given her the ribbon, asserted she had given it to me. When she appeared, my heart was agonized, but the presence of so many people was more power- ful than my compunction. I did not fear punish- ment, but I dreaded shame. Had I been left to myself I should infallibly have declared the truth; but they intimidated, instead of encour- aging me. . . . I know not whether it proceeds from my mortal hatred of all constraint, but if I am obliged to speak, I infallibly talk non- sense... . [This fortnight was] amongst the happiest days of my life. I was continually oc- cupied with a variety of pleasing chimaeras, and never did the warmth of my imagination pro- duce more magnificent ones. . . . She thought she saw in me an honest man, and in this she was not deceived. Had I had no natural inclina- tion to the poor girl, compassion and contra- diction would have produced it in me. I was always a great friend to decency in manners and conversation [The “poor girl” was Thérése Le- vasseur, who became his mistress and bore him his five children, successively abandoned from some of the finest and purest motives produced in the Confessions]... . Of this I appear guilty in my conduct, but my heart has been too much distressed by what I did ever to have been that of an ungrateful man. ... With respect to happiness and enjoyment, everything or nothing was what was necessary to me. . . . This ten- derness was soon changed into rage against the vile informers, who had seen nothing but the evil of a criminal but involuntary sentiment, without believing or even imagining the sin-
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cere uprightness of heart by which it was coun- teracted.*
Passages like these could be almost end- lessly multiplied—all telling the same story of a man sincerely upright in his own opin- ion, betrayed time after time into evil actions through no fault of his, but solely because of the vileness of those who surrounded him. And that is “natural goodness”! That is what it comes down to in the end—nothing better, newer, stranger than fine professions excus- ing baseness and confirming self-love. It is an old story, and long ago it was set down, calmly and simply, for what it really is:
When a man thinks that others are to be blamed, and not himself, for the errors which he has committed, and the many and great evils which befall him in consequence, and is always fancying himself to be exempt and innocent, he is under the idea that he is honoring his soul; whereas the very reverse is the fact, for he is really injuring her. . . . Of all evils the greatest is one which in the souls of most men is innate, and which a man is always excusing in himself and never correcting; I mean, what is expressed in the saying that “Every man by nature is and ought to be his own friend”. Whereas the ex- cessive love of self is in reality the source to each man of all offences; for the lover is blinded about the beloved, so that he judges wrongly of the just, the good, and the honorable, and thinks that he ought always to prefer himself to the truth. But he who would be a great man ought
to regard, not himself or his interests, but what is just.t
Thus briefly can be exhibited the ground of the uncompromising hostility which the doctrine of “natural goodness” and its attend- ant sophistries have called forth from Rous- seau’s day to ours, from Edmund Burke to
*I have shortened one or two passages, and altered
the arrangement of sentences in another. * Plato, Laws, Bk. V, 727, 731-732.
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
Professor Irving Babbitt and Mr. Paul More. And that hostility is the more profound just because, although everything is unmistakably clear in the Confessions, everything is almost infinitely perplexed in those famous books which form the heart of Rousseau’s legacy to the modern world, in the Discourses, La Nouvelle Héloise, Emile, and the Social Con- tract. What may not be found in them? In Emile, for example, are gathered together the precepts of well-nigh all of the important writers on education for a century or more before its composition, and, besides, much derived from ancient classical writers. For though Rousseau hated books, and could never follow with patience the thoughts of another than himself, nevertheless, he read widely and took something from everything he read, and sooner or later found a place for it in the outpourings of his heart. And everything he wrote, whencesoever it came, he touched with fire—the hot fire of intense conviction. Thus he attracted to himself and re-animated much that all thoughtful men value in the literatures of the ancient and of the modern worlds. But thus, too, he became the father of endless confusions;—because all that he wrote he welded into seeming union with the gospel of self-flattery which has subtly exacerbated and depraved the human spirit from one generation to another for a century and a half, and which remains to- day still potent for evil. And it is for this rea- son that the “arch-sophist” has from his day to ours encountered the undying opposition of all men who understand and value integ- rity. Had the “message” of Jean-Jacques been unambiguous it would have been, not harm- less, but far less dangerous to his brothers. The devil, as men have been warned, is never so likely to confound us as when he comes to us clothed like an angel and joins us at our prayers,
A LAST LONDON LETTER
A COUNTERBLAST TO HUMANISM
by Rebecca West
London, June
HEN I read in Professor Paul Elmer More’s article “A Revival of Hu- manism” in the March Bookman,
the phrase “the ignorant and conceited out- burst of Mr. Allen Tate”, I said to myself “I think I shall have to go”. When I read in “Chronicle and Comment” in the same num- ber the ironic comment, “Which is to say that T. S. Eliot, Paul E. More, and Jacques Mari- tain, for instance, are less intelligent than Ed- mund Wilson. Which is absurd”, I said “I know I shall go”. When I read further on in the same article a phrase referring to the writers who have been attacking humanism in other American papers: “After all, their backs are against the wall, for if a few man- aging editors become aware of how things are going, there will be some highly talented literary critics pounding the pavement”, I said, “Lo! I have gone”. Spiritually I was
already pounding the pavement and proud to be doing sO.
* a *
I object to Professor Paul Elmer More’s phrase regarding Mr. Allen Tate not because I am modest enough to think I ought to hide when ignorance and conceit are denounced,
but because I find the phrase incomprehen- |
sible as a description of Mr. Tate’s article, and unpleasantly incongruous on lips self-
dedicated to restraint and decorum. I object to the tone and content of the comparison drawn between Edmund Wilson and the three other critics because their implications strike at the root of criticism. I do not agree, to start at the beginning, with the attempted disparage- ment of Edmund Wilson. I submit that there are no grounds for supposing that T. S. Eliot could have written anything on a par with the articles on modern French litera- ture which Edmund Wilson has recently con- tributed to The New Republic. There is no evidence that he would have been equal to such a sustained effort. To judge from his restricted field of reference he could not have covered the ground; and such authors as he dealt with would have had to fear that re- markable power of misunderstanding what he reads which has led him into certain comic misreadings of individual passages in Shelley and Swinburne and of the entire significance of Benda and Maurras. Those who have pre- ferred familiarity with Mr. Eliot’s work to blind admiration for it know the part of his criticism that deserves to survive either is slight and charming and purely impressionist (like his Dante) or consists of reproductions rather than developments of the ideas of Pro- fessor More and Professor Babbitt. The rest is a flustered search for coherence disingenu-
| ously disguised by a style which suggests that | he has found it.
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Indubitably Professor More is a greater scholar and philosopher than Edmund Wil- son. It is however obvious from his references to modern French literature that he also could not have covered the ground of these particular articles; and we have reason to believe it would have been impossible for him to have judged any series of modern phenomena with the detachment shown by Edmund Wilson. It is to be feared that emo- tion would have led him to reactions as uncontrolled by reason of his use of the phrase “pseudo-scientific treatises” to the work of Mr. I. A. Richards, a scholar of academic distinction fully equal to that of Professor More at the same age. In the reference to M. Maritain we reap the consequences of one of Mr. Eliot’s misrepresentations of French writers. It is untrue that M. Maritain enjoys anything like the pre-eminence as a philosopher in France that Mr. Eliot has led his generation to believe. There are higher and purer sources of Aquinism than him. As those of us who have attended M. Maritain’s lectures know, he is charming and persuasive beyond belief; but he has only the virtues of a popular preacher, and he is not without the defects of that eternal type. It is impos- sible to conceive him writing anything so little determined by its effect on the sensibil- ities of the reader as Mr. Wilson’s articles.
Even more objectionable than this under- rating of a writer who possesses in such high degree the qualities that justify writing—a will to find the truth and a brain that is an efficient instrument for the search—I find the incident that provokes the judgment. What has brought down contempt on Edmund Wilson’s head is his opinion that it is no longer possible for a first-rate mind to accept the supernatural basis of religion. In other words, the writer of “Chronicle and Com- ment” refuses to respect the spiritual strug- gles which have led Edmund Wilson to arrive at the conclusion that it is not possible for a first-rate mind to accept the supernatu- ral basis of religion; yet he is willing to
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
respect the spiritual struggles which have led T. S. Eliot to the conclusion that it is. Yet surely the progress of art and science de- pends on our respecting spiritual struggles only in so far as the protagonist shows by his dialectical conduct that he will accept all truth that he discovers in the course of his struggle, regardless of how far it tallies with his original prepossessions. Certainly Ed- mund Wilson, in his patient research into original sources and in his loyalty to logic, to name but two of his qualities, shows a high standard of dialectical conduct. The de- preciation of him compared with three per- sons whose superiority in this matter is so highly arguable suggests that we have strayed into a world, not high in the intellectual cos- mogony, where it is held that certain beliefs are in themselves a certificate of mental gen- tility. Those who hold them are entitled to look at persons of equal gifts and attain- ments who do not hold them as, in another world (hardly, it seems to me, more unsuit- able for the fastidious), persons in the Social Register look at persons not in the Social Register. In this world bigoted Protestants despise persons not to be despised, such as Valéry and Claudel, because they are mem- bers of the Roman Catholic Church; and bigoted Catholics despise most of English and American letters because it is written by Protestants; and the writer of “Chronicle and Comment” writes of his opponents: “Af- ter all, their backs are against the wall, for if a few managing editors become aware of how things are going, there will be some highly talented literary critics pounding the pavement”. I am not aware of the full list of opponents, but I know they include Ed- mund Wilson, T. S. Matthews, Henry Haz- litt, Babette Deutsch, John Chamberlain, and Carl Van Doren. Most of these writers are personally unknown or very slightly known to me. Some of them are hostile to me. But I know their work, and its level of intellectual integrity; and it seems to me that the ascription of such motives to them, par-
an hee ey ioe ST
A LAST LONDON LETTER by REBECCA WEST
ticularly when it too proceeds from lips self- dedicated to decorum and restraint, is not to be tolerated.
* * *
But even if these expressions had not seemed to me extremely unlike those which should be employed to create an atmosphere proper for the discussion of art and science, I fear that I would have been uneasy in a periodical dedicated to humanism. This is not because I am hostile to its ostensible end: the maintenance of tradition. I would point as a certificate of my soundness in this re- spect to the fact that in my own country my implacable foes are Mr. Arnold Bennett and Mr. St. John Ervine. I do not find however that humanism is likely to maintain tradition as satisfactorily as the modern writers— Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, to name but a few—whom it so sweepingly repudiates.
It seems to me—and here it takes some courage to put down my findings, in view of the controversially archaic disposition of humanists to answer the mildest criticism with accusations of “impudence”—that your faith is too much in the nature of an apos- tolic following of two men, and those two singularly unfitted to act as guide to tradi- tion through this age. I am well aware that Professor Irving Babbitt and Professor Paul Elmer More are among the most learned men now living. Their learning does not however prevent them from laboring under certain disqualifications which forbid them to understand contemporary life. Professor Irving Babbitt gave me a shock in that re- spect which I have never forgotten when I read Rousseau and Romanticism. That book builds up out of the most immense resources of scholarship a case against the movement for the sanctification of ecstasy and the dis- crediting of intellect to which Rousseau gave impetus and which persisted throughout the nineteenth century in France and Germany and to a lesser degree in England. I enjoyed
515 it thoroughly. But what I could not under- stand was the tone of querulousness with which the case was conducted. Throughout Professor Babbitt’s manner was that of one who disdainfully outlines a point of view peculiar to a small group of the saved and anathema to the general. Yet I cannot think of anybody literate, except Mr. Middleton Murry and his small band of followers, who holds a contrary opinion.
Looking back to my schooldays I remem- bered that my literature master had never ceased to try and influence our tastes against the emotional excesses of the Romantic Move- ment. We were always warned that while we might find Keats and Shelley and Byron satisfying in our youth, later we would see the superiority of a steady lamp to fireworks. | “If you cannot read Milton when you are older,” said Mr. Budge in good Scots idiom, “never let on you were pupils of mine.” The uncontrolled exuberance of Bulwer-Lytton and Disraeli, of George Sand and Lamartine and Musset, afforded an opportunity for a great many quite good jokes, which were coupled with recognition of their own good qualities. Thackeray’s guy of Goethe’s Werther (“Charlotte, . . . Like a well-con- ducted person, Went on cutting bread and butter”) was recited with acclamation. This attitude towards Romanticism was not pe- culiar to this particular master. Over the way in the history classroom, I remember, the master told us of Victor Hugo’s comic pro- ceedings during the coup d’état, and clearly gave us to understand that he owed his ridiculousness to participation in a ridiculous movement. Nor was this attitude peculiar to my school. At the time I read Rousseau and Romanticism and was startled by its affecta- tion of eclecticism I questioned my two sis- ters, who had been educated some years earlier than myself, not in Scotland but in England, one at a high school and one at a famous boarding-school, and found that they had been indoctrinated with the very same sensible opinions. Professor W. P. Ker said
516
to me: “It has been the standard attitude during my lifetime”. So thoroughly did we have this point of view drummed into us that nearly all of us found it difficult to read Rousseau because of his emotional fan- faronades, and had to be seduced into doing so by the good Morley. None of us, I think, did so without having received innumerable warnings from our youth up that what he said concerning the angelic nature of the natural man was dubious. In other words, the point of view that Professor Babbitt peev- ishly exhibits as a rare jewel which the world is not fit to own is about as rare as a nickel.
*x * *
Another example of a similar baseless claim is contained in his Democracy and Leader- ship. I challenge anyone to examine the files of the English Tory paper The Morning Post for the last thirty years, and be able to detect any difference between the philosophy which inspired the persons responsible for its leaders and its policy, and Professor Babbitt’s philosophy as expressed in that book. Both take their stand on what Professor Babbitt identifies as the distinction between human- ism and humanitarianism and the condemna- tion of the latter. That was the position which the late Lord Milner and the late Professor A. V. Dicey (to select but two names out of hundreds that offer) based a series of attacks on the Zeitgeist very much in Professor Bab- bitt’s vein. It was the position too on which the late Lord Balfour, abler thinker and statesman than any of those three, based his lifelong attempts to codrdinate the ideals of aristocracy and democracy by urging aristo- crats to submit themselves to the discipline of control to which demos has submitted, and by urging democrats to submit themselves to the discipline of preparation to which aris- tocracy has submitted. It is a position with which every boy or girl who goes to a public or high school is made acquainted in the civics class, with which every adolescent likely to play a part in politics is familiarized
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
in the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, and all other University Unions, at the London School of Economics, the Workers’ Educa- tional Association, and the Independent Labour Party local meetings.
If Professor Babbitt were to appear before them and tell them that they must have standards, and that they must get these standards “by codperation of intellect and imagination” and by disciplining the “feel- ings or affections, to use the older words, to some ethical center”, they would heartily agree and explain that they were very dili- gently seeking for the best means of ensur- ing that codperation and locating that ethical center. He would, if he pressed the matter further, find that they were no more enthu- siastic Rousseauists than himself; and that the reason the Liberal Party had died was that they were just as sceptical as he was of humanitarianism. Again, the precious pearl of wisdom which we are to be shown as an act of condescension turns out to be a truism which is not often stated only because it is so generally accepted.
Professor Babbitt in his attitude to his con- temporaries closely resembles the luckless soldier one has sometimes seen on a parade ground who fails to hear the last order and goes on performing the last order but one, convinced that everybody in the regiment is out of step except himself. It is unusual to make such a soldier a drill-sergeant. It is true that acceptance of Professor Babbitt’s main thesis will do nobody any harm. To prefer Aristotle to Rousseau is certainly the way of grace, and though most of us would do that in any case it illumines argument to have Professor Babbitt state the case again with his unrivalled power of allusion; and simi- larly we can enjoy reiteration on these terms of the truism that it is better to be sane than mad. (“To lack sanity,” he somewhere help- fully explains, “is to be headed towards misery and even madness.”) But to accept his attitude towards the moderns seems to me a pity. It consists mainly, of course, of
A LAST LONDON LETTER by REBECCA WEST
disapproving generalization, but when he touches the concrete he often surprises us by his naiveté. “The partisans of expression as opposed to form in the eighteenth century led to the fanatics of expression in the nine- teenth and these have led to the maniacs of expression of the twentieth. The extremists in painting have gone so far beyond Cézanne, who was regarded not long ago as one of the wildest of innovators, that Cézanne is, we are told, ‘in a fair way to achieve the unhappy fate of becoming a classic’.” Just how genuinely sensitive to art Professor Babbitt is can be judged from this unfortun- ate reference to the heir of Poussin who was despised only because he conflicted with the Romantic Movement against which in theory he has such a fastidious and unerring reac-
tion. No, I have no great confidence in this drill-sergeant.
x * *
As for the other, I approach him with even greater respect and misgiving. Every lettered person must feel the deepest gratitude to the author of “The Greek Tradition” not only for its masterly codrdination of religion and philosophy, and its easy collation of fascinat- ing historical material, but for its power to communicate what had seemed nearly in- communicable in language limpid as spring water. Only the other day I heard a discus- sion that might have lingered on for weeks and then have ended inconclusively, crisply resolved and sent on to another stage by citation of a foot-note from Christ the Word. “I must say here,” he appends to his state- ment that the Christian religion began with a myth, “that by the use of the word ‘myth’ nothing is implied prejudicial to the truth of the event designated. It simply means that any commingling of the two spheres of the divine, and the human, any revelation of God to man, must assume an anthropo- morphic character.” I noted that all parties concerned delayed for a moment to admire the grasp of intellectual process that lay be-
517 hind those two sentences, and that those who knew the volumes had to say what pleas- ure they had derived from them. Paul Elmer More the Platonist is a center of light, whom one can neglect only at heavy cost to oneself. I am sure of that. But I am equally sure that Paul Elmer More the critic of modern litera- ture is a guide that one can follow only at heavy cost to oneself.
One cannot read for long in the “Shel- burne Essays” without coming on phrases that are highly embarrassing to one’s rever- ence for Professor More. Sooner or later one comes on phrases as odd as this: “Longfel- low, we are told by his biographer, wrote but a single love poem (and I, for one, am ready to honor him for this reserve)... .” Why, one wonders, should Professor More respect a poet for “reserve” because he writes only one of a sort of poem not necessarily associated with lack of that quality?—par- ticularly when that one essay, as Professor More points out, shows that quality to excess. One wonders still more when one reads in his essay on “The Irish Movement”: “There is one trick of both (though it is much more marked in Mr. Yeats)” (Professor More had coupled the name of Mr. Yeats and Arthur Symons on the basis of a resemblance be- tween them which was, no doubt, more apparent then than it is now) “which may seem trivial, and yet does in some way con- nect itself with the total impression of their art. This is an insistence on the hair in describing women. Just why this habit should smack of decadence, is not quite clear to me, but the feeling it inspires is unmistakable. Out of curiosity I counted the number of allusions to hair in the few poems that make up Mr. Yeats’s Wind Among the Reeds, and found they mounted up to twenty-three”.
There follow phrases that are some of them otiose and some of them commonplace but that none of them could evoke in any ra- tional mind the description “troubling and unwholesome” that Professor More gives to them. To dwell on these oddities is not to
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number oneself among cavillers who see nothing of the sun but the spots on it. For they are not superficial. They are the minor effects of a tendency in Professor More which has major effects in plenty. It is a tendency to raise a fog of feeling in front of certain aspects of humanity instead of facing them calmly, in spite of the fact that it is obviously impossible for his judgment to operate justly in this dimness. Sometimes this leads to blindness regarding esthetic matters he is committed to discuss; for example, he be- comes so excited over Arthur Symons’s lach- rymose pretensions to promiscuity that he quotes one of his most dreadful poems (“White girl, your flesh is lilies Under a frozen moon, So still is The rapture of your swoon Of whiteness, snow or lilies”, and so, regrettably, on) without any of the called- for comminations. I am not, be it understood, complaining that Professor More is prudish. There is something very far from prudery in the good sense and good breeding with which he refuses to accept Austin Dobson’s pullulations against poor Hazlitt for the Liber Amoris. In point of fact there are more allusions to sex in the “Shelburne Essays” than one will find in, let us say, the critical works of Mr. I. A. Richards. There is no obligation on any author to write about the subject or to keep silence on it.The aspects of life which Professor More refuses to face are far deeper and wider than the single ele- ment of sexual behavior, as he states in one of the most memorable passages in modern literature:
“But now at the last” (he writes of the ef- fect of evolutionary theory) “we are shocked out of our serenity. We are made conscious of the shame of the hidden past, and the ancient haunting terror is revealed in all its hideous nakedness. Have you ever by chance strayed through a museum where the relics of old-world life are gathered together —filthy amphibians armed with impene- trable scales, grotesque serpents eight fath- oms long that churned the seas, huge reptiles
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
that beat the air with wings of nightmare breadth! The imagination recoils from pic- turing what the world must have been when Nature exhausted herself to fashion these abhorrent monstrosities. We have bur- rowed the soil and brought into the light of day these reluctant hidden records of bestial growths. Consider for a moment what it would mean if some new geology should lay bare the covered strata of memory in our own brain corresponding to these records of the earth; for there is nothing lost, and in some mysterious way the memories of all that obscure past are stored up within us. If evolution is true, we are the inheritors in our soul of the experience and life of those innumerable generations whose material forms lie moulded in the bedrock of earth. Consider the horror of beholding in our consciousness the remembrance of such fears and frenzies, such cruel passions and wallow- ing desires as would correspond to those gi- gantic and abortive relics of antiquity. Would not the world in its shame cry out for some Lethean draught of sleep, though it were as profound as the oblivion of Nirvana? This is the terror, then, that from the beginning has beset the upholders of religion, and has caused them to attack the revelations of natural science; for what faith or beauty of holiness can abide after such an uncovering? None, unless to obtain spiritual grace the whole memory and personality of a man be blotted out, and the spirit be severed from the experiences of the body by an impassable gulf. And I think the shadow of this dread is typified in the curse which Noah laid upon
his son Ham.” * x *
Is this really the expression of a mind that one could trust as guide to contemporary art—that is, to the future? I pass over the extremely curious spiritual implications of the passage; though I would give much to hear some sturdy Roman Catholic opinion on a believer who so signally failed to per-
A LAST LONDON LETTER by REBECCA WEST
form “an act of resignation to the divine will” by this wholesale rejection of creation, and who took the doctrine of original sin as a reason for evading the duty of self-exam- ination. It is more relevant to our discussion to note the oddity in an avowed traditional- ist of this perfervid cult of the moment. For the paragraph is, of course, a confession of pure present-worship. Professor More says that he will have nothing to do with human nature except as it is at this moment, or as it was at such moments in the past when it took forms that are consonant with its pres- ent-day notions of its dignity. This program is of course most nourishing to our com- placence. We ourselves at our present stage of development are being taken as the center of the universe. But unfortunately it does more than reject the past, it makes an attack on the present which is none the less mis- chievous for being indirect. For the present is as inextricably fused with the past by descent as a child with its mother. Parts of the present declare their relationship with the past without disguise, and in considering them we look straight down a shaft into the darkness of the primitive heart.
If we abandon ourselves to Professor More’s attitude, we are bound to do as he does and refuse to consider these calmly and bravely, and to raise a fog of feeling about them in which the judgment cannot operate. Other parts of the present do not so visibly declare their relationship with the past; and for these, if we abandon ourselves to Profes- sor More’s attitude, we will inevitably be tempted to falsify an origin and a functional value flattering to our present selves. This means we regard modern religious and philosophical beliefs and social and economic arrangements not as experimental adjust- ments forced on man by his inner need to adjust himself to the universe, each to be judged according to its success in helping him to realize his highest aims, but as the noblest conceivable of ethical achievements, which it would be sacrilege to alter. Here
519 again is a condition in which the judgment cannot operate; and for proof that it does not we have only to read Professor More’s cur- iously passionate and unconvincing attack on Goldie Lowes Dickinson’s mild reform- ism in the “Shelburne Essays”. Since our judgment is the one weapon we are given to insure that the present shall not be the prel- ude to disaster, the consequences of this atti- tude cannot be dismissed lightly.
But even more murderous is the effect of Professor More’s attitude on the future; and one can see the blow being delivered in the requirements he makes of modern art. Works of art, we learn, must show man as possessed of free will and must subscribe to the theory of his dual nature. The mind cannot conceive a single step more likely to bar the progress of mankind than that philosophy should claim the right to make art her mouthpiece. It is the business of philosophy to establish what truths she can, so that the artist grow- ing up within her sphere of influence starts work as close to reality as possible; it is her business to examine the truths established by his creations to see what bearing they have on those of her own finding. But the con- ceptions of philosophy are so much coarser than those of art that it is infinitely distress- ing to think of them being thrust on the artist.
The conceptions of free will and dualism, for example, seem intolerably crude compared to the conceptions relating to character which lie behind the persons invented by, say, Tur- geniev. Why does Professor More think art exists? Does he think it is simply a means of communication, like the mail or the Western Union? Does he not realize that it exists be- cause there are truths which the mind finds too subtle and too awful, to grasp save under the reconciling remoteness of the symbolic representations staged by the imagination? Those who try to make the artist work to their own moral program represent not knowledge guiding ignorance, but knowing- ness misleading wisdom.
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Indeed, this is no place for me. Not only do I find the movement unsatisfactory in its main personalities, I think it likely to exer- cise a stultifying influence on the literature of the next few years, and I wish to take none of the blame. Humanism, with its claims to a final “traditional wisdom” which its followers and nobody else possess in quantities vast as the Humbert millions, with its dismissal of all the contemporary writers who are trying to hand on tradition, is going to do incalculable harm to the sensitive and gifted young man who feels that he can write, finds it difficult to start writing, and is eaten up by a sense of inferiority to those who have found performance possible. He will be encouraged to convert this sense of inferiority into a sense of superiority, not by performance, but by subscription to a very easily held faith. One will then have a world of T. S. Eliots who have not achieved The Waste Land, who are utterly sterile and utterly complacent. They may make some attempts to carry out this new recipe of creating works of art to exhibit the beauty of free will, but this is such a breach of tra- dition that as a traditionalist I can have but little faith in it. Most of the time will, there- fore, be spent of necessity in preaching the doctrine. That is to say, the excellences of Professor Babbitt and Professor More will be celebrated as continually as they have in the last few issues of THE BOOKMAN; Rous- seauism, which nobody but Mr. Middleton Murry believes in, will be hotly denounced, and so too will monism and determinism, particularly in relation to art, which has nothing to do with them anyway; persons vaguely believed, probably on the deluded testimony of Mr. Eliot, to be in sympathy with humanism, will be warmly praised as fellow soldiers in a united army, even when —like M. Benda, M. Jacques Maritain, and M. Maurras—their interest in it is infinitesi- mally small and they are so hopelessly at odds over all issues that it would be impos- sible to persuade them to sit down at the
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
same table; persons vaguely believed to be out of sympathy with the movement will be denounced on principle without scrutiny of their relationship to traditional wisdom. I cannot smother a suspicion that in the course of time this program will be found a little dull. There will be more and more wrangles as to who is firm in the faith and who is not, such as the discussion involving Eliot and Maurras and Professor Babbitt in the “Chronicle and Comment” of the March BOOKMAN. It is a weakness of the flesh, no doubt, but such wrangles are not universally found amusing. After a few years or so of this humanist régime the younger generation will be inevitably so frightfully bored that they will stampede humanism out of exis- tence and rush back to the moderns—Joyce and Lawrence and Huxley and Virginia Woolf will be the gods of their worship, and we will have the twenties all over again. No! They will probably go back to the teens, to Wells and Shaw and Galsworthy. And the thirties, when aske- what they did in the Great War of the iatellect by the editor of the sookMaNn who is ushering in the forties, will have to answer that they put
back the clock. * * *
It occurs to me that the state of affairs which humanism threatens to precipitate in your country resembles that which exists in certain circles today in France. Maurras and Gide and Massis and Lasserre and Benda and Seilli¢re and Maritain all proclaim them- selves the classicists, in possession of the full traditional wisdom of mankind, and cry out on the romantics who have repudiated it. But Maurras and Gide are at daggers drawn, and so too are Gide and Massis; while Las- serre is shocked at the nineteenth-century rationalism of Benda, and Seilliére and Mari- tain are at intellectual fisticuffs. Can it be that this situation is an inevitable conse- quence of engaging in this apparently noble tournament, the war between classicism and
A LAST LONDON LETTER by REBECCA WEST
romanticism? Can it be that there is some- thing false in the proposition debated, which automatically commits both its defenders and its assailants to absurdity? There is good ground for the suspicion. All these people complain with an air of superiority that the romantic “comes into being where sensibility usurps the function to which it is foreign, and not content with feeding and furnishing the soul with the warmth of life it requires, busies itself in steering it”, and classicism rep- resents the workings of minds where sensi- bility is properly subordinated to the intel- ligence. But it is significant that the words I have quoted come from an essay by Maurras, whose exuberant style and swash- buckling political activities prove him the reincarnation of Victor Hugo. It is relevant to remember that each of us wants to have a mind that works coolly and under control; that we are apt to pretend to ourselves that we have it; and that we are equally apt to heighten our pride in our fancied possession by pretending that others are not so well endowed. The battle between romanticism and classicism is perhaps only a dramatiza- tion of this infantile human tendency, which in order to lift itself onto a higher level links itself with an intellectual issue that is itself a confusion. For there has surely been estab- lished on purely terminological grounds a false connection between the Romantic Move- ment initiated by Rousseau (which cer- tainly was dangerous in the rashness and inexactitude of its dialectical conduct) and the healthy dual process necessary to art, the two parts of which we call romanticism and classicism. The first part consists of recogni- tion of new material by the artist. He exposes his intellect and his emotions to a new stimu- lus, he finds expression for his new reaction. The effect is disturbing to himself and every- body else who apprehends it. For it breaks the mould of the universe as it was before the new experience was added to it. Then he is a romantic. If he remakes the mould of the universe afresh, incorporating the new
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experience and re-establishing the order which he has undone, then he is a classic. Both these phases can be found in a single work of art, if it is of the highest order. Both of them can be found in an artist’s output as whole, if he is a great artist. Some- times an artist performs the first part of the process, and another the second. Sometimes to see it in its completeness one has to look not to individual artists but to a movement, a school, or even a civilization. It is therefore no use denouncing the romantic. He is a necessary precursor of the classic. If he has fairly analyzed the experience which is his subject and synthesized his findings into a true work of art, it is no use complaining because he has disturbed the universe. Peace will come later. Art promises this, and it is the high joy of humanity that it has fulfilled its promise. Some years ago I committed my- self to this view of romanticism and classi-
cism in the Herald Tribune, and | stick by it. * x %
When the shrieks of laughter have died down, and the first crop of sniggers at the “ladies” and the exquisite humors of their attempts at criticism have been got over, I will explain why I stick by it with extreme obstinacy. I stick by it because I find that it is also held by Paul Valéry. It has been stated by him in an introduction to Les Fleurs du Mal, and I accept his authority because he is a great poet, a creator. That gives him an authority that the orthodox pro-classic par- ticipants in the discussion are without. For of Maurras, Gide, Massis, Lasserre, Benda, Seilli¢re, and Maritain, only Gide is a crea- tor: and he is so distraught a seeker after novelty in his creations that he gives no reassurance. It is true that Jean Moréas was associated with Maurras, but he died advis- ing his friends to stop worrying their heads about romanticism and classicism and think a little more about the difference between good and bad writing. The fact is that be- hind this classicist campaign there is no litera-
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ture at all. It unfortunately appears that the same charge can be brought against humanism. I have read with interest the list of contributors to the volume in Humanism and America: Norman Foerster, Louis Trenchard More, Irving Babbitt, Paul El- mer More, G. R. Elliott, T. S. Eliot, Frank Jewett Mather, jr. Alan Reynolds Thomp- son, Robert Shafer, Henry Hayden Clark, Stanley P. Chase, Gorham B. Munson, Ber- nard Bandler II, Sherlock Bronson Gass, Richard Lindley Brown. I heartily agree with Professor Babbitt’s opinion that the text “By
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST I930
their fruits ye shall judge them” is an excel- lent touchstone to apply to movements. But there is an overwhelming reason why it cannot be applied in this case. I recognize in this list the name of only one creator, T. S. Eliot, and he, in spite of his genius, has long ceased to create. For these we are to ex- change Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Aldous Hux- ley, Virginia Woolf. Forgive me, but I am not gambler enough to dare such an ex- change, or to seek association with what looks so remarkably like a league of the non- creative against the creative.
AN OPEN LETTER IN REPLY
Dear Miss West:
I am very glad that you availed yourself of my cabled invitation to “be as emphatic as you want to” when you asked whether I minded your devoting your last letter to an explanation of your resignation as THE Boox- MAN’s European correspondent. I am glad, for its own sake, to be able to publish so vigorous and effective a piece of writing. I am also glad to give the many BookMaNn readers who are not in sympathy with hu- manism the satisfaction of seeing an attack on it in these pages at least as powerful as any that have appeared elsewhere. These readers should now be reassured that while Tue Bookman is editorially in favor of hu- manism, and will continue to champion it as vigorously as possible, THz BookMan’s pages are, as always, open to writing from other points of view if it seems to promote the circulation of ideas or the cause of literature.
I am extremely sorry, naturally, to lose you as a monthly contributor, and Tue Boox- MAN’s readers will share my regret. The magazine has never had a more popular con- tributor; which is not surprising, since you have never, I think, done more brilliant work than as its roving European correspondent.
There would be an added poignancy to my regret if I really thought, as your article might suggest, that you were leaving because of a sentence of Mr. More’s which is hardly as sharp as you yourself are accustomed to use, and because of two sentences of mine inter- preted in a way that the sentences themselves will not admit. But I realize that your differ- ence with THe Bookman has deeper causes, and that a regular association between you and the magazine was doomed from the time the present policy was adopted.
I am surprised that so practiced a hand at ascribing “unconscious” motives should have thought I was questioning the integrity of the critics of humanism in suggesting that they are so immersed and involved in the domi- nant literary tendency that they are unable to dissociate themselves from it sufficiently to examine fairly a contrary set of ideas. I have elsewhere charged, and I think established, that there has been considerable lack of scru- ple in the attacks on the humanists. But any- thing so ridiculous as a blanket accusation of venality was far from my purpose. These ad hominem arguments are, I admit, not the highest form of controversy. I have resorted to them occasionally on the assumption that
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they are the only kind of argument some of the opponents of humanism will understand, since they are the only kind they use. There is no other way, I submit, to make critics aware of what they are doing in making their slurs about snobbishness, gentility, race preju- dice, and so (regrettably) on, or such remarks as yours about Mr. More and compulsion neuroses which I quoted last month. —I am the more surprised that you should accom- pany your indignation at my supposed charge with a similar charge against T. S. Eliot.
I hesitate to think what you will make of my remarks on Edmund Wilson in my conclud- ing article, after seeing what happened to the two sentences about him which you quote. In those few words, it seems, I struck at the roots of criticism, I poured general disparage- ment and contempt on Wilson, and I refused to respect his spiritual struggles. Goodness! Is it really such a crime, these days, to sug- gest that Christians, too, can be intelligent? I knew that I was dealing with inflammable material in protesting against Wilson’s ex- ample of the popular rationalistic bigotry which classes all Christians as defectives, and I knew that I was making matters worse by belligerently presenting three names in Wil- son’s own field which disprove his. silly notion; but I was hardly prepared for the particular development which you have given to my small remark. Nor am I prepared for it now; I am afraid I will have to pass J the opportunity for comment. at
I am not quite certain whether in measur- ing Eliot, More, and Maritain by the stand- ard of a certain series of articles of Wilson’s, and in deciding that they fall short, you were seeking to establish that the three men have second-rate minds. Since that was the only point at issue, I would like to suppose that you were dealing with it. On the other hand, your test seems so inadequate that I would like to suppose you were not. I will grant freely, for the sake of argument, that the sub- ject of Wilson’s articles could not have been handled so well by the other three men. I
will grant any comparison of this kind you want. I will admit that Wilson can write a better sonnet than Maritain, a better novel than Eliot, a better comedy than More. I will admit, nay I will proclaim, that nobody else in the world could have written the brilliant parody of James Joyce that appeared in the New Republic last spring. But what then? It would still remain true that counter- comparisons would demolish Wilson’s con- tention. Your series should have a different ending: “In this world bigoted Protestants despise persons not to be despised, such as Valéry and Claudel, because they are mem- bers of the Roman Catholic Church; and bigoted Catholics despise most of English and American letters because it is written by Protestants”;—and bigoted sceptics say, “It is no longer possible for first-rate minds to ac- cept the supernatural basis of religion”, and “Most Americans of the type of Eliot... have some such agreeable fantasy [as the Church] in which they allow their minds to take refuge from the oppressions and per- plexities about them”, and “It is highly argu- able whether Paul Elmer More, Jacques Maritain, and T. S. Eliot will accept all the truth they discover, if it does not tally with their original prepossessions”.
Sometimes they say worse. I am truly sorry that you were led to make your remark about a world “where it is held that certain beliefs are in themselves a certificate of gentility”; because it forces me to say that your form of rationalist bigotry seems to me rather worse than Wilson’s. Where he was foolishly rul- ing Christians out of the councils of intelli- gent men, you were, according to the only meaning I can find in your words, seeking to stop them from defending themselves in the only way possible, by making the naming of names seem something odious. It is apparent that you wrote under the impression that I am a believer. If I were, I think that your thrust would have succeeded. I would have been wounded, dismayed. My mouth would have been stopped. I would have risen to
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defend my right to speak, and I would have been left blushing and wincing at being told that my very presence was an insult. But it happens, since you have made the unimpor- tant fact relevant, that I am as sceptical of re- vealed religion as you or Edmund Wilson; or, shall we say, as J. M. Robertson or Joseph McCabe, or even Joseph Lewis or E. Halde- man-Julius. I am not defending or opposing faith or its absence. I am simply insisting on an obvious truth which involves elementary justice. For that reason, your remark did not touch me as it was presumably intended to. Its only effect was to make me regret, for your sake, that I was not this time in a posi- tion as editor to suggest that you strike it out.
The obvious fact which I am asserting, the fact that persons of our persuasion have no monopoly of “first-rate minds”, is not a pleas- ant or an easy one for us sceptics. It is indeed a very difficult one. It does not tally with our original prepossessions. It shocks our self- esteem. It confuses our cosmos. But there it is. That Wilson is half aware of it is shown by the way he contradicts himself in the matter. On the same page in which Eliot is denied a first-rate mind and told that his conversion “is sadly symptomatic of the feeble condition of modern literary people, of their unwilling- ness or incapacity to confront the realities about them”, he is—very grudgingly, to be sure—admitted to have the first-rate mind that has been taken away from him. You can see just how grudgingly: “Even if a few first- rate men like Eliot manage to convince them- selves that they do accept them [church doc- trines], one cannot see how they can honestly contemplate the possibility of a renaissance of faith general enough to make the Church in- tellectually important again”. Eliot cannot “honestly” hold an opinion which would ob- viously be the first that would seize a man after his conversion!
As I say, this quarrel is not one I am per- sonally involved in. But there would seem to be sufficient reason for my entering it in the circumstance that my own position renders
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
me impervious to the kind of reply which you have made, and the kind which Wilson made when Mr. Cuthbert Wright protested in a letter to the New Republic. Wilson was able to dismiss him by saying “Between a believer and an unbeliever there can be no real argu- ment”, and to continue smugly on his way, patronizing Eliot, sneering at More, and dis- regarding such men as Maritain. In his reply to Mr. Wright, who had suggested that Eliot might be discovering valuable things in the older tradition to which he was going back, things needed today, Wilson strikingly re- vealed another of the contradictions involved in his position. I quote the whole passage, which you may or may not find highly em- barrassing to your reverence for its author: “I am very far from being sure .. . that humanity as a whole is not better off in the United States today than in Europe in the Thirteenth Century. It depends on what you mean by ‘better off’—it depends on what you mean by civilization. Eliot says that he means ‘a spiritual and intellectual coérdination on a high level’, as distinguished from ‘material progress, cleanliness, etc.’ But, as a matter of fact, are not these two things inextricably bound up together? Is there really any differ- ence in value between the instinct to be clean or to travel quickly and the instinct to preach fine sermons or to make beautiful verses? Does not civilization include all these things, and, in discussing how much people are civ- ilized at any given place or time, must we not take all these things into account? Mr. Wright would probably like better art and literature than the contemporary American world produces—and so should I. But how would the other inhabitants of the country like to be set back in the European conditions of the Thirteenth Century—with no bath- rooms, no public schools and no automobiles? With the ignorance, the slavery and the plagues of that day, would they really be ‘spiritually’ better off? Would the cathedrals really make it up to them? Would Dante and Aquinas make it up to them? Would
AN OPEN LETTER 525
these masterpieces of medieval civilization really make it up to Mr. Wright and myself?”
I will not stop just now over the incidental jewels of this memorable passage—the con- fusion of the functions of plumbers with those of poets and priests, the equating of cathe- drals and filling-stations, the description of the finest fruits of a spiritually unified age as the indulgence of an “instinct to preach fine sermons or to make beautiful verses”. Do not be thrown off by the sudden irrelevant intro- duction of the “other inhabitants”; Wilson reappears in his last sentence. Do you see the huge contradiction I mean? Eliot, we are told, is fleeing from the perplexities, the op- pressions, and the other realities of the mod- ern world which he cannot face. But, on the other hand, life in the modern world is much easier than life has ever been before! Neither this nor the other contradiction is verbal. The contradictions are inherent in Wilson’s whole view of history. I am willing to respect Wil- son’s spiritual struggles as fast as I learn about them. But I will not be convinced “that he will accept all truth that he discovers in the course of his struggle, regardless of how far it tallies with his original prepossessions”, until he accepts the very evident and very im- portant truth which I was pointing out in the words that occasioned this discussion.
I am delighted that you, too, are on the side of tradition, however much we might differ in defining it. I remember being amused to notice, when you wrote on “Tradition in Criticism” and T. S. Eliot wrote on “Experi- ment in Criticism”, in the little book the Oxford Press brought out last year, that the two papers were almost identical in the field they covered. With a few rapid strides you crossed the ages and landed in the nineteenth century, to which you devoted most of your space; while Eliot, in his manner of dealing with the present, was more frequently in the nineteenth than the twentieth. I am remind- ed, also, of V. F. Calverton’s protestation that even he is a traditionalist: “We do need tra- dition, but it must be a new tradition in con-
sonance with the new age. The task that con- fronts us is to establish that tradition”.
Your objections to humanism, or rather to the humanists, seem to simmer down to two. The first is that the humanists have nothing new to offer, but are merely repeating what every person of sense has always known. It seems to me that you make out a very good case for this point by your rich array of in- stances. In fact, I wonder whether you have not been a little too successful. I myself was thoroughly convinced; I do not think I could have been more convinced even if you had quoted the abundant humanist testimony to the same effect, even if you had quoted from the article of mine which annoyed you so. But is not the reader, after it has been demon- strated to him that the humanists are in ac- cord with what is generally accepted by the soundest authorities, likely to be somewhat disconcerted by your second line of attack? For here he is told that the humanists are really very terrible people: they cannot think, they do not know what is going on in the world, they are confused and poorly informed in the very fields in which they have spe- cialized; they are so thoroughly pernicious that they will, in brief, stultify all whom they do not bore to death. Now is not this a little hard on the late Professor Ker, and the late Lord Milner, and the late Professor Dicey, and the late Lord Balfour, and the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, and the good Mr. Budge, and your sisters’ teachers? One or the other of your two accusations, I daresay, is true. But, if you will permit me a purely tech- nical criticism of your argument, I think it would have been better if you had sought to establish only one instead of both of them.
Somehow I was less embarrassed by your quotations from Mr. More than you were. You found it “odd” that he should praise re- serve; I am inclined to think that he took pains to insert that parenthesis in order to have precisely that effect. For I have had it borne in on me, perhaps because I have con- siderable familiarity with his work rather
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than blind admiration for it, that there is an extraordinary degree of courage in the way in which he has always made it a point to speak in behalf of qualities that have been unpopular during his lifetime. “Reserve” would probably head a list of such qualities. If he had suggested that reserve was the one quality in a lyric poet worthy of honor—that, indeed, would have been odd. But I have not come across that particular suggestion... . More counts the allusions to hair in certain poems in an attempt to analyze a subtle lit- erary effect; you count the allusions to sex in More and I. A. Richards in order to—I am not sure just what. Not to show that More is prudish, for he has “good sense and good breeding” in these matters. On the other hand, certainly not to attest his good sense and good breeding, for his feelings get the better of him in these matters and he refuses to face the facts.
There have been some highly elaborate mis- quotations of humanists in recent months, but I am inclined to think that you take the prize by the way you have used the passage about the filthy amphibians, of which you make so much. Did you really think that to be More’s comment on evolution? Then you missed the whole point of not only one of the more memorable passages, but one of the most memorable essays, in modern literature. If you will read again, carefully, the study of Lafcadio Hearn in which the passage occurs, you will see that it means something entirely different. More was commenting, you may remember, on the writings in which Hearn had for the first time in literature brought together the Oriental idea of metempsychosis and the Occidental idea of evolution. “From this union with science,” he said, “the Orien- tal belief in the indwelling of the past now re- ceives a vividness of present actuality that dissolves the Soul into ghostly intimacy with the mystic unexplored background of life. As a consequence of this new sense of imperma- nence and of this new realism lent to the indwelling past, all the primitive emotions of
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
the heart are translated into a strange lan- guage, which, when once it lays hold of the imagination, carries us into a region of dreams akin to that world which our psy- chologists dimly call the subliminal or sub- conscious”. (Remember, this was in 1904.)
He then gave some examples of Hearn’s use of this novel combination and comment- ed: “Is it not proper to say, after reading such passages as these, that Mr. Hearn has intro- duced a new element of psychology into lit- erature? We are indeed living in the past, we who cry out that the past is dead”. Then More threw out the suggestion that “the fore- boding of this dreaded disclosure may ac- count for many things in the obscure history of the race”, and developed the suggestion for several pages: the Greek legend of Pro- metheus, the early Christian battle with pa- gan philosophy and science, the conflict with the followers of Copernicus, the battle over Darwinism. Throughout, More’s viewpoint was obviously an ultra-rationalistic concep- tion of “the warfare between science and reli- gion” which I imagine he would smile at now; although he paraphrased sympatheti- cally what he took to be the attitude of the guardians of religion. It must have been his ability to do this last which threw you off. After summarizing history through the bio- logical theory of evolution, he came back to Hearn’s innovation and carried his sugges- tion down to the present, or rather into the future, by launching into the eloquent pas- sage which you have quoted. Read in its con- text, it is seen to be no more the author’s attitude than is his presentation of the view- point of the executors of Hypatia and Bruno.
I do not say that the mood was utterly for- eign to More; indeed I can scarcely conceive that anyone of sensibility has not felt it occa- sionally. But there is a vast difference between the elaboration of a suggestion which involves the eloquent expression of a mood, and the considered judgment of a scientific theory which you have mistaken it for. Mr. More, you may be sure, became accustomed to the
AN OPEN
idea of evolution some years before you and I were born. Your whopping misquotation reminds me of Joel Spingarn who some years ago said of More’s work: “One after another the writers of the modern world are (to use a phrase of his own) ‘stretched on the rack of a harsh ethical theory’”. It was indeed a phrase of More’s, but he was paraphrasing a hostile critic before replying to him. A man cannot always write in school-boy English for fear his critics will take his indirect discourse, his unascribed quotations, his paraphrases, and his imaginative flights as the outpourings of his heart. I sometimes wonder why the anti-humanists do not simply invent some weird passage, put quotation marks around it, and introduce it by remarking, “As Mr. More once said”. Think of all the time I would spend hunting for it!
I am rather puzzled by the embarrassment to humanism which you seem to find in the lack of unity among the French anti-roman- tics. Did anyone ever say they had much more in common than their varying degrees of anti-romanticism and anti-modernism? And if diversity is a weakness think of the diversity among the opponents of humanism! You yourself attack Middleton Murry, and as you point out, some of the American anti- humanists are opposed to you—as I could illustrate with numerous quotations. T. S. Eliot’s influence and value could hardly be exaggerated in general, but I think you do exaggerate when you ascribe humanist inter- est in the French anti-romantic writers to Eliot’s testimony, whether “deluded” or not. Eliot has done much to make them known in the past ten years, but Babbitt, for instance, has been writing about them for nearer twenty-five. When you say that Eliot has greatly over-valued Maritain’s rank as a phi- losopher, I imagine you refer to his descrip-
LETTER 527 tion of Maritain, widely quoted in blurbs, as “the most conspicuous figure and probably the most powerful force in contemporary French philosophy”. But is that not really a very guarded estimate of Maritain as a phi- losopher, and merely an allusion to the posi- tion he automatically attained on becoming the first representative of the scholastic re- vival to catch the ear of the public? There are, as you say, purer sources of Aquinism than Maritain. But I assure you that Eliot and the humanists know that; just as they know that there are in some respects purer sources of Aquinism than Aquinas, in Saint Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato. Eliot may somewhere have misrepresented Maurras, in spite of a familiarity with his work that dates from before the war, but it is not on Eliot’s say-so that I question the two adjectives you apply to Maurras. I find his style clear, subtle, forceful, often eloquent; but exuberant, never. And can that mild, deaf, scholarly recluse really be pictured as swashbuckling? Your two words, incidentally, exactly fit his vastly different colleague Léon Daudet.
I do not reject your theory of classicism and romanticism because its author is a lady, but because it seems to me to have little connec- tion with those “facts” that you and Edmund Wilson and I all love so. And Valéry’s status as a “creator” gives him as a critic exactly || what authority his criticism can earn. I myself find most of his criticism extraordinarily thin and poorly reasoned, as well as maddeningly pretentious. If I am in this a poor critic, the reason is that my judgment is wrong, and not that I am not a distinguished “creator”. I am _, afraid you will find that your jibe at the hu-}\ manists in this respect, like your other one, || is a little too successful, since it rules out names that you would scarcely care to ignore.
3c.
The conclusion of Seward Collins's article “Criticism in America” is post- poned until next month, in order not to overload this issue with humanist controversy. It seemed unfair to Miss West to delay her article longer.
“THE LION AND THE LADY DANIEL”
Anonymous
own husband. Here’s my Owen, for ex-
ample, who jogged solemnly along as a well-behaved novelist, sticking respectably to his typewriter and turning out his book a year, with a short story or two for full meas- ure, to say nothing of half a dozen book re- views that gave him a chance to high-hat his fellow-craftsmen and a nice little handmade poem to me on the calamitously recurring occasion of our wedding anniversary. Here’s my Owen, I repeat, who developed a really disturbing fondness for his own fireside, the regular hours of the surburbanite and a charred old briar-wood pipe that kept even the children off his knee when he wanted to cogitate over his next chapter.
I'd even fallen into the habit of worrying about Owen. I'd wonder if he wasn’t turning into too much of a recluse. I used to wake up in the night and ask myself if he wasn’t a trifle too sane and safe; if, in fact, he wasn’t getting a little moss-grown and losing his contacts with life. And I was disturbed by the secret thought that my once dashing knight of the ink-well was slipping into the decorous and unadventurous middle age of life, a sedate old Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire in knickers, in knickers that were usually wrinkled and baggy where they shouldn't be wrinkled and baggy, and decorated with dog-hairs and pipe ashes.
But little did I know my Owen. And lit- tle did I know my luck. Little did I dream
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that my placid old house-cat was going to blossom out so abruptly into a sort of Ben- gal tiger. And it all seemed to come about through Owen writing that play of his. Owen, of course, had tried to write plays before. Every normal-minded and active-bod- ied author in this big world, I imagine, has an aborted drama or two tucked away in the bottom drawer of his desk. I’d even done one myself, for our Women’s Club, and with my own fair hands dyed the outing flannel for the backdrop and splatter-painted the canvas flats and rehearsed my self-conscious little company of incompetents and sweated in agony when the plump Mrs. Weevil forgot her lines on the first night, and the equally plump Mrs. Klinker, awaiting in vain her cue, turned and stalked indignantly off the stage and out of the production. Yes, I’d been through those refining fires. And Owen himself had had his limited experiences with the Little Theatre movement, doing arty and impressionistic one-act things for an aban- doned group of suburbanites who let Thespis loose in a sketchily reconstructed stable where the inextinguishable ammoniacal odors couldn’t fail to remind the audience how the horse had preceded the automobile and the equally inextinguishable rats ate holes in our cold cream and we sometimes had to chase the indignant red squirrels off our stage and an incorrigibly leaky roof was finally made impermeable by nailing canvas flats across the weathered shingles, causing our little
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House of Drama to look uncommonly like a gun-pit camouflaged against the eyes of pass- ing airmen.
But this was only toying with the mask and buskin. And Owen, all along, had been nursing his secret hunger to do a real play. He had often and innocently enough pro- claimed, coming out of a Broadway theatre, that he’d like to have a try at the drama. In- deed, I never knew an author in my life who wasn’t bitten by the bug, who didn’t want to climb aboard the theatrical band-wagon, after sitting through a good performance and see- ing the well-oiled machinery of professional play-acting functioning in its well-organized way. It makes you want to jump into melo- drama about the same as good band music makes you want to march in a uniform.
Owen, I repeat, had already toyed with this game of play-writing. But his experi- ences had not been exhilarating. He’d done a poetic drama in five acts which got between covers and sold, all told, exactly fifty-seven copies, largely among indulgent friends and relatives who felt that to buy it was a sort of family obligation. Then he went mercenary and did a thirty-minute sketch for a vaude- ville team, a one-act thing with as much gun-play in it as the battle of Gettysburg. And out in the sticks and the grapevine circuits, we were given to understand, this rapid-fire sketch was received with approval. But from it, for reasons we could never quite fathom, Owen received only the opening week’s royalty. Always, after that, he found himself a full jump behind that agile couple in his efforts to collect. He turned later to what he called a comedy of manners, which made history in a way all its own. For, after a great deal of writing and wiring and tele- phoning, Owen finally read his masterpiece to a manager who, as it turned out, smoked through the first act, yawned through the second, and placidly slumbered through the third.
“No,” was this potentate’s final decision. “That last act kills your chances.”
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“But,” objected my naturally indignant lord and master, “how can you criticize a thing when you’ve never heard it? You were asleep when I read that last act.”
The large-bodied producer rang for his secretary at the same time that he addressed my crestfallen husband. “Well, sleep can be a criticism, can’t it?”
That story, in due time, got into print and was attributed to about every author and producer in America. But it also served to put a crimp in my poor Owen’s stage aspira- tions. Before the winter was over, however, he got still another blow below the belt. My husband, after a great deal of manceuvring, finally wrung from a reluctant producer a promise to read the comedy of manners, but the manuscript, unfortunately, got lost be- hind the producer’s office radiator for two or three months. Yet it was eventually found and eventually read. It came back to us the day after Christmas, to throw a fine black cloud over our holiday festivities—festivities, I might also add, already keyed up by the prospect of the bigger and better life that was to follow close on the production of the masterpiece. It came back accompanied by a note which ran something like this:
I am returning The Angel with Fallen Arches. This comedy, unless punctuated by frequent and prolonged applause, would run at least thirty minutes short. And after a careful reading of the script I’m of the opinion that the required punctuation would not be there.
But all this didn’t entirely turn Owen away from the drama. It merely changed his av- enue of approach. It soured him on the man- agers and producers and prompted him to go out gunning for the stars themselves. He put pants on The Angel With Fallen Arches, so to speak, by fattening up the “lead” and making it a male star’s part. Then he went after the actors, sleuthing them down in their innermost lairs. He got acquainted with stage entrances, and lunched at the Lambs; had long midnight telephone calls from the Players, and more than once missed
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the last train home waiting for some lordly actor to get out of his make-up. He confided to me on three different occasions that The Angel was finally sold. But something always happened. Somewhere, at the last moment, there was always a hitch. And my poor old worn-out Owen finally proclaimed that he was sick and tired of player-folk, and that he was going back to a white man’s work.
So The Angel folded her wings and went to sleep in the back of the failure-drawer in the old highboy, which we always spoke of as the Port of Missing Scripts. And Owen went meekly back to his novel writing and truculently resigned from the board of the Little Theatre, and fell into a decidedly gloomy frame of mind regarding the future of the American drama. I even thought, in my blindness, that his soul had been purged of its last play-writing impulse. But little did I know of the puma that prowled about in the cellared gloom just under the polished floor of fictioneering.
The first inkling of it came with an extra absent-mindedness on Owen’s part, when he twice forgot to rack off his home-brew and let Teddie and Allie sojourn over at Aunt Alicia’s for two whole days before openly commenting on their absence. He’d give me my morning kiss with a sort of Mariana- in-the-moated-grange dreaminess and he didn’t even notice my new black velvet din- ner gown. I even began to wonder if Owen’s affection for his wife wasn’t getting as threadbare as his old tweed suits.
Then my perplexity was increased by strange mutterings I caught on the wing from Owen’s sanctum sanctorum. I'd heard him, often enough, testing out a line of poetry by intoning it aloud. But in these newer sounds were none of the mellow cadences of blank verse. They were something much more ex- plosive, sometimes loud and sharp, some- times low and intense, sometimes pleading and passionate.
But I found out, a few nights later, what it was all about. I was propped up with three
pillows, reading Houssaye’s Aspasie-Cléo- patre-Théodora and feeling especially lone- some and neglected, when Owen came in and sat down on the side of the bed. I knew, by the headlight look in his eyes, that he was uncannily wide awake. And, by certain signs and portents, I also knew he wanted to ease his soul of something.
“Polly,” he said, as he took my book away from me, “I’ve a great idea for a play!”
“And I’ve a great idea you won't sleep tonight,” I said as I noticed the semaphoric twitch of his left eyelid, a sort of mouse- nibble of nervousness which always showed when he was over-excited or over-tired. So I rolled out of bed and put on my dressing- gown and lambs’ wool mules and got ready to go down and make cocoa and onion sand- wiches for Owen. For, ridiculous as it sounds, he always found something narcotic in onion sandwiches and cocoa.
“Now, what’s the great play about?” I asked as I crawled into bed and supplanted Houssaye with Bermuda onions.
Owen told me, through a mouthful of sandwich, that it was the sort of thing that would make Shaw and O’Neill look like also-rans. But I insisted on pinning him down to particulars. So, after he’d finished his onions and cocoa and got into his pajamas and shuffled down to the living room and back for my cigarettes, he sat with his shoul- ders against the footboard and his heels companionably against my knee-joints and told me the story of his play.
He told it badly; for authors, I’ve found, are never good advance agents of their own wares. But, even discounting that, I wasn’t exactly crazy about either his plot or his characters. I wasn’t, at least, in the beginning. It seemed too much the old story of a fatal misstep, a harried heroine, a wringing of the bitter truth from the broken lady after the truth meant tragedy to even her victori- ous enemy. As I said before, I wasn’t crazy about it all. But a writer’s wife can never afford to be a wet blanket. It’s her business
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to fan the little spark into open flame. Yet, oddly enough, as I talked it over with Owen I began to get a new slant on the thing. It was old, in a way, but it was elementary. I began to see it was what theatre-folk call sure-fire stuff. It was the ancient triangle of contention with an entirely new twist. It was as rudimentary as Adam and Eve and the Garden, without smartness or trickery, but with an appeal that got under your skin the more you considered it.
Owen worked it out, eventually, but the process was a hard one on the family. As a novelist, he had been a conspicuously silent worker, stitching his sentences together as quietly as a housewife at her needlework. But when he turned to the drama he became as declamatory as a Neapolitan melon-seller. He shut himself up in his study and ranted and raved and knocked the furniture about until on more than one midnight I had to go to the nursery and quiet Dawn by saying: “Don’t cry, darling. It’s only Daddy prac- tising his play.”
Owen even got the habit of stopping on the street and saying: “Did you see that ges- ture? That’s great!” He'd pussyfoot close to a pair of bricklayers arguing over the price of macaroni and make mental notes of what they said and did. He took my breath away one afternoon on the side lawn by suddenly crying out: “I hate you! Oh, how I hate you for that!” And when I somewhat tremu- lously asked him what I'd done this time he explained that he was merely testing out a new line for his third-act ending. Just why he had to vocalize it, I don’t know.
He was always thinking about his play. And in this case he wanted to talk about it as well. He rearranged the furniture in the living room and made me hold one part while he held the other and together we'd go through a scene, go through it hammer and tongs, until Teddie’s Airedale crawled away, tail down, under the Chesterfield. Once Owen even brought Thomas in from the garden, ingenuously intent on practising
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a choking scene on our stolid man-of-all- work, But after one rehearsal the indignant Thomas proclaimed that he’d quit the job before he’d have any more buttons pulled off him that way. It was only by resorting to the severest measures that I persuaded Owen not to build a stage at the eastern end of our sun-room. So instead he merely hung a pair of resuscitated portiéres there and fell to experimenting with lights and burning out fuses, Every playwright, he explained as he busied himself manufacturing a baby spot by enclosing an electric bulb in a coffee can and covering it with colored gelatine, had to know something about stage lighting. And unless you did it yourself it wasn’t done right.
More than once, too, Owen got out of bed in the middle of the night and scribbled and declaimed and scribbled again. And when I’d warn him about waking the chil- dren he'd explain that he’d hit on some new lines that had best be pinned down on paper before he lost them. Then he’d try them over again, with divers experimental gestures, and wag his head in approval and crawl back into bed, mumbling and muttering and twitching and twisting as he fell off to sleep again, for all the world like a Fourth of July pinwheel burning itself out.
But the play was written in the end and I soon found to my sorrow that our ordeal was just beginning. Anyone who had been through the theatrical mill might have told me that the creation of a play is small po- tatoes compared to the placing of a play. And Owen’s play had to be placed.
About this, however, Owen had a few ideas of his own. His precious play, which, after giving it seven different titles, he finally called The Lion and the Lady Daniel, was only too plainly writen for a woman star. Owen had made it so starry, in fact, that it impressed me as a trifle lopsided, with about all the good lines going to the lady. He’d deliberately baited his hook for the fe- male of the species. He’d emulated the Fifth
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He knew it so well, in fact, that he got a bit toplofty in his talk about agents and producers and proclaimed that The Lion and the Lady Daniel wasn’t going to get moth- eaten in any manager’s desk. Not if he knew it. He didn’t propose to do things that way. When you make popovers they should be put straight on the breakfast table. And when you write a star play it should go to a star. And that was what The Lion and the Lady Daniel was going to do.
Owen, I must explain, had already been inspecting the firmament for his bright par- ticular star. He’d been taking me into more Broadway performances than I'd seen since the winter he acted as dramatic critic for an evening paper. So I enjoyed my second unex- pected riot of play-going, though Owen, I must acknowledge, remained much more solemn about it. He was, all along, secretly in search of the Right Woman. He was seining the theatrical world for her. He was sedulously checking over every able-bodied actress on Broadway, quietly estimating, as- sessing, appraising. He was going up and down the line, as intent as a police captain circulating through the Rogues’ Gallery in search of a suspect. He was looking for the Lady Daniel who’d fit best into his Lion’s Den. And he was not only doing it with a disturbing air of superiority, but while on that quest he was ordering new clothes from his tailor and caparisoning himself in rai- ment that made him look like an actor out of a smart English comedy.
But it was about this time that I put a finger in the pie. When I heard that Susie Whitebait was planning a studio party for nearly all the accessible lady stars on the
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Equity list I boldly suggested that she should have Owen follow the Algerian sand-reader on her program and read The Lion and the Lady Daniel to her assembled guests. And to that, much as it might seem like carrying coals to Scranton, Susie agreed. It was Owen, in fact, who failed to agree. But I fully ex- pected that. So I merely sat tight, waiting for my lord to make his surrender a sufh- ciently graceful one. Then, running true to form, he finally explained that business had to come before pleasure and announced that he supposed he’d have to read the con- founded play to Susie’s studio rats, protesting that actresses were nothing but a shooting pain to him and intimating that he’d rather face a firing squad than any such constella- tion of fixed stars at short range.
But, as I’ve already intimated, I knew my man. And I knew, even before Owen started practising in the back garden, that he was going through with the thing. So I held my peace. I didn’t even object when he declined to let me go with him. I knew well enough that I'd only make him nervous and self- conscious, and this was an occasion when he intended to fling himself.
Just how completely he did so I realized when I unpacked his bag the next day. His dress collar had lost its starch and his shirt looked like something that had been thrown into the Hudson. But Susie herself called me up and told me how wonderfully Owen had read. And she must have been right. For two of the assembled actresses asked to borrow his script, a third inquired why he’d never gone on the stage, and a fourth, some- where between midnight and dawn, motored him to the station in her own landaulet and tried to wheedle a sort of shot-gun contract out of my poor tired spouse while her chauf- feur contentedly slumbered beside the wait- ing Red Caps.
But Owen, I’m glad to say, kept his head. His play, he knew, was not for that pulchri- tudinous yet slightly passée barnstormer. He capitulated to none of those perilously beau-
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tiful ladies. He brought both his heart and his script safely home again. But the moc- casin telegraph of Broadway began to get its work in. The news was bruited about that a smashing hit was waiting for the right star. It was whispered around that a second William Vaughn Moody had a sec- ond Great Divide up his sleeve. And even- tually Mahomet, who had once worn his shoes out trying to get to the mountain, woke up and found the mountain meekly willing to come to him.
The first one to land on us was Voletta Offley, fresh from her sabbatical year in the studios of Hollywood. And Voletta was a type entirely new to me. Her advent in a maroon-colored limousine with a California license plate was preceded by a barrage of hastily scrawled special delivery letters and midnight telephone calls and ruinously long telegrams. Owen was quietly triumphant, and I myself slightly overawed, when he an- nounced that the great Voletta was coming out to have lunch with us and hear the play read. It seemed almost too good to be true, after so much angling and fishing and coax- ing for a hearing in earlier days. It was al- most like having a five-pound bass flop up the bank and attach itself to your hook. For the world had read how Voletta’s Holly- wood salary had been something in six fig- ures, how a Los Angeles real estate operator had shot himself because of her beauty, how it took two secretaries to handle her fan mail, and how she had been dubbed the most photographed woman in America.
I didn’t worry much about my Owen get- ting within shooting distance of such a siren, responsive as I knew my spouse to be to abstract beauty. He may have been half poet, but he had a head on his shoulders. And a wife and children to think of. And a play to sell.
But Voletta’s advent, on my part, meant a quick inventory of my larder, a getting out of guest towels and a polishing up of the family silver. For when you receive a demi-
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goddess who has given public testimony as to her private bath salts, who has seen miles and miles of pulpwood used up to present her effulgent smile to an avid world, who has been press-agented and rotagravured into a household word, you have to put on your best bib and tucker and be ready for her.
So it was a pretty nifty luncheon I plotted, with Thomas brought in from the garden and arrayed in his freshly pressed if slightly too voluminous butler’s suit, and my best Madeira tablecloth brought down from the linen closet and Owen’s last bottle of Barolo cooling in the ice-box.
But Voletta never ate that luncheon. She never even appeared for it. In fact, at ex- actly a quarter to four she rolled regally up to our porte-cochére, walked in before either the tremulous Tillie or the magnificently solemn Thomas could receive her at the door and was abstractedly grinding a ciga- rette-end on my carefully waxed living-room parquetry when I meekly entered and ex- plained that I was Owen Brown’s wife.
“Where’s Owen?” she demanded, without even looking at me.
My first inclination was to tell her the truth and say he was up in his study cussing her. But I smiled sweetly and informed the imperial Voletta that he’d be down in a minute. I even made an abortive effort to engage the lady in conversation. But it was fruitless from the first, for the mind of the lady was otherwise engaged. She opened a heavily embossed maroon bag—it matched her car and her chauffeur—and studied her- self long and intently in the mirror on its flap. Then she applied lipstick to her illus- trious mouth and did divers and sundry things to other portions of her exposed sur- face. She did almost everything but take a bath right there in front of me, while I wanly observed that it was warm for that particular time of year and weakly trusted that the trip from the city hadn’t tired her. But I might as well have saved my breath. She wasn’t even listening to me. And while
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I sat bathed in the aura of her inflammatory French perfume I found myself coming to a decision all my own.
That woman, I said to my own wounded soul, was not going to get Owen’s play. She would never, never do as a Lady Daniel. Yet even as my heart hardened against her I had to acknowledge that she was beautiful. She was a trifle larger and heavier than I had expected, but as a picture she was perfect. She was like a Norse myth come to life. And there was something careless and open and lawless about her that kept telling me she might have a dangerous influence on any- thing as unsuspecting and impressionable as my obtuse Owen.
But Owen, when he came in, was busi- ness-like enough about it all. He even asked Voletta if she'd like tea, before they settled down to work. And he also asked me if I'd sit in on the reading, which I declined as promptly as Voletta declined the tea. But even from upstairs 1 could hear Owen going through the familiar old lines, with the famil- iar rise and fall of the voice. And I remem- bered, as the clock told me that Voletta would surely be with us for dinner, how Owen had so often said: “The play’s the thing!” And his play, I told myself, would always come first with my husband. He was reaching out for his star; he was looking for the torch-bearer who could light the way to a good production, even though she was al- ready over-familiarly calling him “Owen”. And it ill-behooved a jealous wife to stand between her husband and success.
So I tried to be fair to Voletta when she stayed on for dinner and insisted that the script be brought to the table and argued with Owen about his third-act curtain and enlarged on how he could give her a better entrance in Act One if he had the English butler crying openly as he tied up her trunks, or perhaps be kneeling over her handbag so that she could place a tremulously under- standing hand on his head as he sobbed at the thought of her departure,
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I caught the tail of Owen’s eye at this sug- gestion, and from that split second’s expres- sion harvested the fortifying deduction that reason was still on her throne, that even my poor impressionable Owen hadn’t been en- tirely chloroformed into subjection. Voletta, I noticed, didn’t enjoy much of my dinner, hard as I'd worked to make that repast a regal one. She didn’t acknowledge that she was on a diet, but she merely picked at things. Any sane woman could see, from the line of Voletta’s hips, that the thought of banting wasn’t entirely absent from her as- tral mind. And once dinner was over she disappeared into the library with Owen, where they went over the last act of their precious play and left me free to do my mending and help the children with their lessons while Thomas and the visiting chauf- feur played cut-throat poker in the garage between our dusty old roadster and Voletta’s imperial limousine. Owen didn’t emerge, in fact, until well after eleven. He looked a bit haggard and harried as he met me in the hall.
“She wants something to drink,” he said in a hollow whisper.
“Tll make a milk punch,” I suggested. “But will she take it?”
“The punch?” questioned Owen.
“No, the play,” I whispered back.
“You're blamed right she’ll take it,” pro- claimed my cocksure Owen. “But the ques- tion is, could she put it over?”
“What does she say about it?” I tem- porized.
“She’s been telling me how great she is for the last hour and a half,” was Owen’s half-moaning whisper.
“But when’s she going home?” I de- manded.
“She said something about—about staying all night,” admitted Owen, with a sigh of resignation that did much to put my troubled heart at rest.
And Voletta stayed all night. I put out my best crépe de Chine night-gown and a new
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tooth-brush for her, wound my travelling- clock, and went to bed. It seemed hours later when Owen woke me up by shaking my shoulder.
“What is it?” I asked, startled by both the sternness of his face and the fact that it was a quarter to three in the morning.
“She can’t do it,” he said grimly.
“Do what?” I promptly demanded, fool- ishly thinking of Potiphar’s wife.
“She can’t play that part,” proclaimed my liege lord.
“Then why don’t you tell her so?” I natu- rally inquired.
Owen wrung his hands in a manner so much of the stage that I was reminded of the fact you can’t play with pitch without getting some of it on your finger-tips.
“You can’t tell things like that to women like that,” he announced. “And she’s taken the script to her room with her.”
“How touching!” I scoffed. But Owen was in no mood for levity.
“She'll never give it up,” he dolorously proclaimed. “She’s calling it her baby-child and deciding just who can and can’t be in the cast.”
I sat up in bed. I was wide enough awake by this time.
“Owen,” I asserted with all the strength of my being, “that woman is too fat.”
“I was afraid so,” admitted Owen. “But what can we do? She’s got the script. She thinks I’ve given it to her. And she'll freeze onto it.”
I sat on the side of the bed, thinking it over. Then I came to my decision. I felt like a second Lady Macbeth inciting her hus- band to murder; but it was no time for half measures.
“Owen,” I solemnly averred, “we've got to get that script.”
“But how?” asked my tired-eyed husband.
“You've got to go in and get it back, before she wakes up.”
Owen shuddered and gulped, gaping at me as though I were the ghost of Banquo.
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“You don’t mean go into her room?” he demanded.
“It’s the only way,” I averred.
“But it’s—it’s like burglary,” protested Owen.
“That script is your property,” I pointed out.
It took some persuasion, but in the end Owen agreed with me. Yet his hands, I noticed as he thoughtfully took off his shoes, were a trifle unsteady. And there was dew on the dramatist’s brow as I put out the lights and touched a match to my bedroom candle. We had a further consultation in the dim glow of that candle, and decided it would be best for him, once he was in- side, to use Teddie’s new birthday flash-light. Then, after a few more hollow whispers, we went padding down our own hall like a pair of housebreakers. I could even feel my heart pounding as we came to Voletta’s door. There Owen, with a rather guilty look on his face, listened and waited and finally pressed an ear flat against the panel.
“She’s asleep,” he whispered to me.
“But are you sure?” I ventured.
Owen nodded.
“I can hear her,” was his grimly enunciated whisper. “She’s—she’s almost snoring.”
“If she wakes up,” I whispered back, “you'll have to tell her it’s a habit. Say you walk that way in your sleep, when you get over-tired and worried.”
Owen merely motioned for silence and stood listening for another long minute or two. Taking a deep breath, he ever so care- fully clasped the door-handle and as guarded- ly turned it. He swung back the door, inch by cautious inch. Then, before I quite realized it, he had disappeared in the darkness.
I waited there with my heart in my mouth. I waited so long that I began to ad. vance one crazy theory after another as to just why he didn’t come out. I even thought of the Los Angeles real estate operator and shook with a nervous chill. Then, when I was almost ready to burst, the door swung
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open again, inch by guarded inch, and a skulking and shadowy Owen backed slowly out of the room. There was a dangerous light in his eye and his face was wet with sweat. But in his hand he held his precious script.
“I’ve got it,” he triumphantly announced.
“Where was it?” I asked, trying to keep my teeth from chattering.
“She had it in bed with her,” was his somewhat indignant whisper. And I won- dered, as we went tiptoeing guiltily back to my room, why my liege lord so mistily re- minded me of Sextus Tarquinius at Colla- tium. But he’d had enough of sleeping beau- ties. For instead of going to bed, he an- nounced that he was going to motor over to Aunt Matilda’s and stay there until our house was clear of Voletta Offley.
I tried to argue with him but it was no use. Ten minutes later, I heard him backing out the roadster and incontinently flying from the lady who, one brief day earlier, was to bring him fame and fortune. He went, sul- lenly and selfishly, leaving me to face the lioness robbed of her cub.
The lioness, it so happened, remained in her lair until high noon. She slept until well after twelve, rang for toast and coffee, sent back the toast because it was buttered, com- plained to Tillie about the water not running sufficiently hot in the bathroom, and appeared, fully dressed and bejewelled and mascaraed and lipsticked, at about two in the afternoon.
I greeted her smilingly. I even somewhat quaveringly inquired if she had slept well. But, to all intents and purposes, she neither heard nor saw me. It was a habit with the woman.
“Where’s Owen?” she demanded, as her maroon-colored limousine slithered up to our
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humble porte-cochére. And if the face of the liveried potentate on the driver’s seat was a resentful one it was due to the fact that our honest Thomas, in honest games of chance, had deprived the maroon-clad visi- tor of all his money and a perfectly good plate-gold watch—though I had no knowl- edge of that consoling situation while I stood explaining how an important family matter had called my husband away that morning.
I waited, with my heart skipping a beat, for the next imperial edict from the gera- nium-tinted lips. Our star was not in the most ebullient of moods. She was paying, ob- viously, for the exaltation of night before.
“Well, about that play of his,” she said, as she studied her face in the maroon-bound mirror. “If he expects me to take that rdle and put the thing over, he'll have to change my second act the way I said and certainly give me a new third-act curtain. He under- stands that, of course?”
I said I supposed he did.
“And he’d better bring in the script and have me show him where those first-act lines need fattening up,” announced Voletta as she applied the jewelled lighter to her cigarette.
“Where—where is the script?” I found the courage to inquire.
She looked at me, as she’d always done, without quite seeing me.
“Somewhere up in the bedroom,” she care- lessly announced as the chauffeur opened the door of the limousine for her.
But the script, of course, wasn’t up in the bedroom. All I found there half an hour later was a residuary odor of Place Ven- déme perfume, my apricot-colored night- dress with a hole burned in it, and a five- dollar bill which might have been meant for either me or Tillie.
SHALL CREATORS OWN THEIR CREATIONS?
by Lyman Beecher Stowe
F A MAN creates a table he owns that table
absolutely. He may sell it or loan it or
do what he likes with it. If he buys or raises a horse he owns that horse absolutely. He may sell or rent it as he pleases. If, how- ever, the same man were to create a novel, a biography, a play, a poem or a song his ab- solute ownership would cease as soon as he published his creation; or, in other words, as soon as he used it for the purpose for which it was made. In order to retain any rights in it after publication he must have it copy- righted. This is a technical process attended to by the publisher or producer. The slightest error in carrying out this technical process in- validates the copyright. The creator then loses his rights in his own creation. Anybody can publish or produce it and pocket all the pro- ceeds. The slip may have been made by an irresponsible clerk in the employ of the pub- lisher or producer. That makes no difference —the author loses his rights just the same. The writer, as former managing editor of a great publishing house, knows from experi- ence that a certain percentage of such mis- takes is unavoidable. And every time one occurs some innocent author loses his rights in his literary property. The American author has suffered under this unjust handicap in his own country ever since he first received any protection at all, which was in 1790 when the first Federal copyright law was enacted to carry out the provision of the Constitution which reads as follows:
The Congress shall have power . . . to pro- mote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and in- ventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
If the Vestal Bill which is now before Con- gress, and which has been recommended by the Committee on Patents of the House of Representatives, after exhaustive hearings be- comes a law, American authors will be given an inherent and automatic right in their crea- tions and these time-dishonored risks of au- thorship will be at last removed.
If the American author desires to sell his product outside his own country he is still further handicapped. The archaic character of our copyright law has made it practically im- possible for us to join the International Copy- right Union created by the Berne Convention to which all the nations of the world belong except Russia, Siam and ourselves. All au- thors except the Russians, the Siamese and our own not only have an automatic inherent right in their creations as soon as they have created them but it continues to protect them absolutely after publication or production in all the countries belonging to this union.
Our authors must apply separately for copy- right in every foreign country in which they wish to sell their books or produce their plays, which means expending great sums for the employment in each country of a lawyer fa- miliar with the copyright law of that country (there are no lawyers familiar with such laws
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throughout the world). For the ordinary au- thor this represents a quite prohibitive ex- pense. For the big money-making author it usually represents hardly more than a means of exhausting all or most of his probable profits. Yes, there is one other way! He may pose as a British subject and secure the pro- tection of the copyright union in this disguise. Our government has recently been notified, however, that this courtesy protection will no longer be granted. An American author vis- iting a library in a South American country was told by the librarian that we were ap- parently producing no literature. To refute this charge the American took from the shelves several books of American authorship. In each case the librarian pointed with tri- umph to the British copyright line. Ordinarily the author neither goes to this usually pro- hibitive expense nor hides behind the British lion, with the result that foreigners may and do steal with impunity the creations of his brain. Jack London’s books, for instance, have had large European sales on which neither he nor his heirs have received anything. Marc Connelly, author of The Green Pastures, stated in testifying in Washington before the Committee on Patents that when his play Dulcy was produced in Holland his only compensation was a copy of the program in Dutch with his name misspelled. He added that he had never heard of any American au- thor being paid anything by the Dutch pro- ducer of his play. No wonder our plays are popular in Holland!
My grandmother, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had no means of protecting the dramatic rights on Uncle Tom’s Cabin because the first law to grant such a right was not passed until 1856, four years after the publication of the book. The play, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is said to have been produced more times than any other play in the history of the world. Mrs. Stowe received absolutely nothing from these almost incredibly numerous perform- ances except a box sent her by the manage- ment when the play was given in Hartford,
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
Connecticut, where she lived in her latter years. She invited her neighbor, Charles Dud- ley Warner, to go as her escort and he al- ways said afterward with a smile that she could not follow the plot. Even under our present law, which was passed way back in 1909, my grandmother would presumably have received nothing on the productions of the play in foreign countries.
Since American authors had no means whatever of securing foreign copyright until 1891, Mrs. Stowe received nothing except a few complimentary checks on the huge for- eign sales of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Very rough- ly estimated these sales during her lifetime ran to about 6,000,000 copies, or about three times as many as the domestic sales. Had she, however, had the advantages of the present or 1909 law I doubt if she would have secured copyright in any foreign country other than England, It is absurd to suppose, in any case, that she could or would have gone to the Herculean effort or excessive expense of se- curing copyright in the thirty to forty coun- tries in which the book was sold.
The copyright on Uncle Tom’s Cabin ex- pired two years before the author’s death. When she was old and sick and under heavy medical expense she was thereby deprived of the greater part of her income. The period of copyright was then twenty-one years with re- newal for a like period. Under the present law it is twenty-eight years with renewal for a similar period. Miss Margaret Widdemer, in her testimony before the Committee on Patents on the Vestal Bill, mentioned that her first and still her best-selling novel, The Rose Garden Husband, was published when she was in her early twenties. She comment- ed, . . . “by the time I am incapacitated seri- ously where would that copyright be? It just won't be”. In other words, if she should live to be over eighty, which is the custom in her family, she might suffer the same penalty as did Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Should the Vestal Bill become law it would eliminate the possibility of all such injustices,
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An American author’s copyright would be inherent and automatic not only in America but, through its provision for entering the International Copyright Union, in all other countries except Russia and Siam. Also, the term of copyright would be extended to the life of the author and fifty years thereafter. No longer could authors be penalized for writing books of great longevity by being deprived in their old age of the income from the sale of such books.
As Mr. Will Irwin, the Chairman of the Copyright Committee of the Authors’ League, said in his statement before the Com- mittee on Patents, “It is as though we were trying to administer traffic in our cities, to regulate traffic with the rise of the automobile, on the traffic laws of 1894”. The movies and the radio have developed since the present law was made and television is on the hori- zon. A novel is usually first sold to a maga- zine for serial publication. The magazine copyrights the material. By one court decision the magazine thus secures all rights to the use of the material in any manner. A later decision modified this ruling by declaring that while the magazine owner thus secured control of all rights he merely acts as trustee for the author of rights other than the first serial rights which he primarily bought. Au- thors have made gentlemen’s agreements with the honorable and responsible magazine pub- lishers to release to them on request all rights other than the first serial rights, Such agree- ments have become trade custom among the publishers of good standing. Hence the maga- zine that has taken out the first copyright on a novel will customarily release on request book rights to the publisher of the material in book form, dramatic rights to the producer of the play based on the material and movie rights to the moving picture producer. But the author enjoys these subsidiary rights, often far more valuable than the original rights, on the sufferance at least to a degree of the magazine which took out the original copyright. The unethical or less ethical maga-
SHALL CREATORS OWN THEIR CREATIONS? by LYMAN B. STOWE 539
zines, being under no legal obligation to re- lease such rights, sometimes refuse to do so. Then every time a right is released and some further copyright applied for there is the danger of some omission or clerical error which when it occurs and is detected deprives the author of his further rights.
Mr. Chester Crowell, in his testimony be- fore the Patents Committee, told of an in- stance where he sold for a small amount to a third-rate magazine an article which for some reason the magazine for which it had been written had not taken. This magazine then proceeded to sell the right to digest the ar- ticle to another magazine for more than they had paid for it.
Miss Margaret Widdemer told of an ex- perience she had with a magazine that ran serially one of her novels. The magazine said: “We always hold three months’ copyright on your movie rights before we release them, just as a matter of form”. Knowing nothing of the possible dangers in this apparently inno- cent idiosyncrasy she assented. As a result she lost the movie sale and what amounted to a good many months’ income.
These injustices too would be obviated by the Vestal Bill, which would vest all rights inherently and automatically in the author. He would be furnished with facilities for reg- istering his copyright and would be advised to do so, not for the purpose of securing his rights but merely to facilitate their defence should any one try to steal his material.
This bill would give the author not only an inherent and automatic copyright but what is termed a divisible copyright. That means that he could sell his material separately for each type of use such as first serial publication in a magazine, second serial publication in news- papers, dramatic production, moving picture production, radio broadcasting, etc. This is what Mr. Chester Crowell would call the au- thor’s right to sell each customer for these successive rights a ride on his literary horse without as heretofore incurring the risk of his horse being either killed or stolen.
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It seems strange that demands so obviously just should have been so long withheld. Ap- parently authors were long neglected by Con- gress because they were numerically negligi- ble and pretty generally without the power and prestige of wealth. Of late years, having become essential to the gigantic magazine, theatrical and moving picture industries, they have perhaps been neglected because of their too great importance. That is they have be- come an integral part of great and necessarily somewhat conflicting interests. Congress quite naturally and reasonably demanded essential unity of purpose among the various interests effected before passing proposed legislation. As a result the Vestal Bill is the outcome of six or eight years of effort to reconcile the conflicting views of these interests. This Bill has finally achieved practically the united backing of all the interests of authors, artists, composers, labor, book publishers, magazine publishers, theatrical producers, moving pic- ture producers and radio broadcasters. As Mr. Elmer Davis said in his testimony before the Vestal Committee, “These are industries representing several billions of dollars of in- vestments whose raw material is subject to copyright. We authors perform the humble but necessary function of providing the raw
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
material on which this formidable pyramid is based”. I say the backing for the bill is now practically unanimous. The Shuberts alone remain in opposition. Their opposition slogan is that the proposed law would injure the le- gitimate drama. This tender solicitude of the Shuberts for the legitimate drama is moving, but let us hope that the members of Congress may be able to steel themselves against this appeal to their esthetic sensibilities.
Incidentally this bill must become law be- fore January 1, 1931, if it is to be fully effective in promoting its purposes. Our invitation to join the Berne Convention and thereby be- come members of the International Copyright Union on equal terms with the other forty member nations expires at that time.
This bill will come up again in the next Congress, which will convene on or about December first. If every sympathetic reader of this article should before that time write a letter of endorsement either to the Hon. Albert H. Vestal or his or her own Congress- man—or, better, to both—the already excel- lent chances of its passage before the first of the year, or in time to give American authors and composers the full benefits of member- ship in the International Copyright Union, would be materially improved.
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FICTION
A TRUE STORY by Stephen Hudson (KNOPF. $3.50)
Tue English writer whose pseudonym is Stephen Hudson has “here reconstructed and reknit” the material of this novel which “was contained in four volumes which have ap- peared separately under different titles”. The book deals with the current conventional un- conventionality, revolt, emancipation, and the “dreary joylessness” of naturalistic living. The novelist traces the increasing despair of Rich- ard Kurt, dividing the narrative into three parts corresponding to his relations with his mother, his wife, and his inamorata—a “cow- girl, with her codfish mouth and her stupid baby talk”. As a boy Richard suffers from neglect in an English home where his father, a severe business man, and his mother, a so- ciety woman, have no time for their chil- dren. A chasm grows between the materialistic, decorous father and the idealistic, emotional son—a chasm bridged many years later only when they meet over the Monte Carlo gam- bling tables. The mother’s round of social functions estranges her passionately devoted son, who is not without a sort of CE&dipus complex, and he hungers for affection among tutors and continental schools. In Part II, while in America he meets Elinor Colhouse, “by nature too cold, too self-interested, too calculating”, who takes advantage of his drunken passion and his sense of responsibility to trap him into what he later describes as their loveless, childless twenty years of mar- ried life. In Part III, Richard’s mother having died without forgiving him, he and Elinor drift about Europe with other pleasure-seek- ers; they finally build a magnificent villa on Lake Como. Then Richard, “damnably, hor-
ribly lonely”, assuming a “tolerant indiffer- ence” toward his wife’s “indiscretions” with “amoral” Reggie Brendon, enters into a gro- tesque liaison with young Virginia Peraldi, serving maid and daughter of an Italian count. She said she liked “horses and dogs and rowing and sailing and swimming and working with my hands”. She does not bring him happiness, however, for he finds her “capable of a deceit deeper than that of a courtesan” and he leaves her at dawn in a Milan hotel with “a deadly feeling of disgust, of repugnance, of loathing”. He then literally buys a divorce from Elinor and, hating life, feeling that “one must care for something if it’s only a dog”, he plans to re-embark on the matrimonial venture.
From the artistic standpoint the story is not without symmetry of structure and a certain beauty born of economy, bareness, lucidity and precision. However since the author’s in- terest seems to be mainly in motivation and in the relation of cause and effect, the thought of the book deserves most attention. While Mr. Hudson seldom rises above the welter of chaos which he presents, seldom gives evidence of having any norm, any constructive and posi- tive conception of central values, it seems to me that he has made a reasonably faithful study—like most modern novelists—of a natu- ralistic psychology fertile in despair, of a stale eccentricity. It is the old story of the Shelleyan “T-loved-I-know-not-what”. The young hero, blessed with health and wealth and brains, diagnoses his own case:
“I am discontented and I am afraid I always shall be because whether I’m right or wrong, I know I want something in every way different from what-I’ye got or ever can get. . . . There
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on ays gets broader and uglier and dirtier as it flows on... .”
In the course of his ennui and his nostalgic drifting he feels “the spell of the lake”—Lake Como—and “he had found what he desired. This was ‘the something else’ he had been seeking. . . . He would buy that villa and make it a thing of beauty”. He found, how- ever, like other romanticists, that man
. may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life whose foundations are within.
He realized now that all this beauty and charm of scene, all the idle luxury of his life, had only made its emptiness more apparent. That idea, the seeking an objective cure for a subjective malady, the creating of an atmosphere of happiness out of material things, the building of a shrine for the worship of nothingness, was the greatest illusion of all.
Finally, confessing himself “a despondent, spineless, useless rag of a man”, he renders the typical verdict on the fruits of naturalistic liv- ing: “Life is hell, bloody hell, nothing but hell”. One might think that one step toward the “cure” for the “subjective malady” of this “spineless” drifter would be an assertion of some degree of will, an endeavor to become not the victim but the shaper of circumstances. Mr. Hudson, however, tends to ignore such a “cure”, for he—like most modern novelists— is a determinist; indeed, Mr. Edwin Muir, in a warmly appreciative essay, assures us that “This sense of necessity, of cause and effect, is at the centre of Mr. Hudson’s vision of life,
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
and he has rejected more and more everything which is irrelevant to it”. If the dramatization of the deterministic cult is faithful, one might raise the question as to whether its content is not of negative value: we are instructed how to live so as to get the least satisfaction. If the dramatization itself tends to be drab and mo- notonous one might consider to what extent this is due to the absence of a clean-cut conflict between wills or between will and circum- stance. I raise these questions, because they seem to me portentous to the modern novel in general.
HARRY HAYDEN CLARK
THE AUTOCRACY OF MR. PARHAM by H. G. Wells (pouBLEDAY, DORAN. $1.00)
AFTER many experiments in preaching Utopias, Mr. Wells has somewhat changed his tactics and written what amounts to a good satire topped off with considerable political moralizing. The result is a novel again urging a better world governed by the “released and free acting intelligence of mankind”.
Like everything that Mr. Wells writes, The Autocracy of Mr. Parham is facilely done. The characters of Mr. Parham, Oxford don and representative of those sound and con- servative British doctrines which Mr. Wells dislikes, and of Sir Bussy Woodcock, who for all his obtuseness pessesses that Wellsian wisdom alleged to lie in a bold intellectualism, are sharply and effectively drawn. But they are, of course, mere effigies which the author buffets or caresses according to his thesis.
The device used in this novel for achieving the utopian lesson is amusing. Drawn into a séance, Mr. Parham is seized by the ectoplasm of the spirit which dominated all the great conquerors from Alexander to Napoleon. Once this spirit is within him, all Mr. Par- ham’s British notions are turned into action. The result is world war and international chaos. Even if the whole thing is a dream, Mr. Wells manages to tell his parable and illustrate his text.
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The satire in the book is diverting, the fan- tasy interesting; but the thesis, like that in Mr. Wells’s other novels, we suspect of being unsound. At the risk of being accused of agreeing with Mr. Parham, we must say that Mr. Wells’s confidence in “free acting intelli- gence” and his opposition to tradition, disci- pline, and obedience to the age-old lessons of mankind are no less visionary than the lands in which his rules of life apply.
Mr. Wells may have drawn here a world as he and certain others would like to have it be, but there is much doubt whether such a world is remotely possible or even ideal, that is to say, a world as it should be.
Like other readers, we lament the passing of the purely fantastic Wells, or the Wells who wrote Tono-Bungay.
ALAN BURTON CLARKE
MOUNTAIN CITY by Upton Sinclair (BONI. $2.50)
Ir woutp be interesting to know how many people today are reading Upton Sinclair’s novels as they come from his typewriter; not reading the jacket blurb and a few chapters to discover how the story begins and ends, nor merely buying the latest book to keep the Sinclair shelf in the bookcase up to date, but actually reading them through. It would be interesting to know also what Mr. Sinclair assumes are the kinds of people who com- prise his audience, what he thinks of them in the mass and what he believes his service to them to be in the composition of a novel such as Mountain City. There would seem to be some doubt whether he pauses to con- sider what the individual reader, with his outlook and mental processes, may be like. If he thinks of his audience in the mass, it is not impossible that he has permitted himself to grow rather far away from this mass, so that his impression of its collective responses to life and literature has become vague and no longer trustworthy. Though Mountain City deals with individuals, in the elucidation
of extremely general ideas, the individuals are not clearly seen nor felt. They are, how- ever, important instrumentally, and the lack of any impression of real flesh or emotion in the treatment of their lives is so marked that these questions about Mr. Sinclair’s own sense of his public are raised almost inevi- tably, the more so since Mr. Sinclair has been credited with a public even by people who would not credit him with a great deal else.
As literature, this novel is something like the Horatio Alger stories of an earlier day. It tends to be as lax as a schoolboy’s letter to his chum, on the one hand, and at the same time there is something distinctly stilt- ed about the style of the writing and think- ing on many pages. There is quite a little dialogue in the book; and if a boy from ten to twelve years old were to take it into his head to write a sketch or short story he would be quite likely to write dialogue su- perior to this in conviction and serviceability, mainly for the reason that the boy would probably see and hear his characters more clearly than Mr. Sinclair does. If in shunning the art of writing Mr. Sinclair believes he has arrived at the hard natural speech of the street or the prairie, he is in error. His in- clination is to revert rather to a pretentious- ness of style associated with the transitory popular fiction of the seventies and eighties. The prose of Pater is exciting in one way; prose based on the vernacular—racy and self- sufficient—is exciting in another way. But dis- cipline is as essential in the one case as in the other, even when an author has an easy sense of the true values of natural speech, seemingly so lacking in Mr. Sinclair’s case. It is some- times possible to excuse dull writing because of some force or other quality in the story or idea that is being set down. But Mr. Sin- clair’s treatment of Jed Rusher, as a symbol of the greed and anti-social power-urge must be called superficial, if not naive, in our day.
Mountain City resembles the Alger stories also in being a “success” story. Jed, born in a hut in the cattle country, becomes an oil
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magnate. The difference is that Jed is Mr. Sinclair’s villain, of course, not his hero. The climax of the story is reached when Jed, by knavish trickery, makes himself the husband of Lulu Belle, a Goldilocks sort of damsel and an heiress to vast wealth. She is fifteen years old. An impoverished student, Jed has been employed as attendant to her grand- father. His first great opportunity comes when Lulu Belle says to him one day:
“Oh, Mr. Rusher, Mamma told me about where babies come from! ... Did you know about that, Mr. Rusher?”
“Yes, I knew about it,” Jed said. His neck was on fire, and the flames were spreading to his ears, to his cheeks. A swift glance showed that he and Lulu Belle were alone.
... “She wouldn’t tell me how you come to have a baby,” Lulu Belle said. “How is it, Mr. Rusher? Does it just happen, or is it some- thing you have to do?”
Silence! The flames had reached Jed’s fore- head now.
Jed, however, is not destined to complete Lulu’s education, though we are told that he “wrestled with these problems for more than twenty-four hours before their dark and sinister aspects flashed upon his mind”. In fact: “Yes, if he married the only child of Wallace J. Macy, he would have the equiva- lent of a kingdom and be set upon the road to conquer others—no doubt of that!”
Here, in addition, we have “a storm wind shaking the trees along the street and a storm of desires shaking Jed’s soul”. On the follow- ing page there are “thunder rolling in the sky above Jed Rusher’s head, and an earth- quake in the undermost deeps of him”.
... Pale and inconsequential seemed col- lege. . .
And now Jed sees little Lulu again: . .- “Oh, Mr. Rusher!” The child looked at
him with serious wide blue eyes. “I’ve already found out.”
“You have?”
“Yes. I met a boy, and I asked him about it, and he told me.”
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
. . « “He told you? And then?”
“Well, he said what we would have to do for me to have a baby, and he seemed to know all about it, so we did it.”
These conversations continue for some time. Finally, with the tacit consent of stupid little Lulu, Jed contrives to make himself the child’s husband, by threatening her mother with arrest if she causes an abortion to be performed, and by pretending to be Lulu’s guilty lover. Thus made a member of the Macy family, Jed becomes very wealthy. But, by the time he becomes a financial power and a “great man” in his own right, Lulu meets a man she really loves. Jed consents to a divorce when Lulu offers to surrender her share of their fortune.
This selection of material for quotation must not be thought facetious; it seems mere- ly the most obvious and easiest way to indi- cate the quality of Mountain City as a work of fiction. Passages dealing directly with other phases of life in contemporary Amer- ica, whether politics, finance, law, education or poverty, are treated, likewise, in a fashion which would cause the work to be described not only as dull but shoddy in the case of almost any other writer today. Such facts about contemporary society as are set forth in this meandering chronicle, moreover, have been part of the general body of popular knowledge of the adult population, and all inquisitive children, for some time. Any moral value inherent in the story of the rise of Jed Rusher, and the attendant exposure of iniquities in our economic and political sys- tem, is dissipated by a manner of presenta- tion which can no longer be serviceable for any purpose, narrative or intellectual, how- ever rudimentary the aim.
It can hardly be preposterous to conclude that Mr. Sinclair has permitted the distance that stands between any author and his audi- tors to widen, in his case, until the inertia that continually besets the popular imagina- tion no longer exists for him as a perpetual challenge; if an author ceases to address him-
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FICTION 545
self to a tangible public, his standards of lit- erary communication are certain to lapse. Mr. Sinclair presumably thinks of him- self as addressing, first of all, the toiling population, not only of America but of all countries. Perhaps he has fallen into the habit of writing “down” to that population, a habit which in all periods of history has been more devitalizing for everybody con- cerned than that other habit—not so differ- ent in origin as it might seem—of writing “up” to the intellectuals.
STIRLING BOWEN
EGYPTIAN PORTRAIT by C. W. Grundy
(puTTON. $2.50)
Pernaps because an adult knows so much less about childhood than might be expected, many novels seem at their best while dealing with the earliest youth of their protagonists. As long as the characters are kept young enough, they seem rare individuals. Then the boys and girls reach school, university, love, maturity. They are only like everybody else. The book is put down. The first few chap- ters remain in the memory. The body of the story (to which the first is only introductory) is forgotten. So with Ahmed. As a street gamin of Cairo, he is memorable. As soon as he gets to Oxford—the sports, the learn- ing, the immature political discussions, the girl artist—he fades slightly. This girl, Morelle, he marries and takes back to Egypt. There, with his law degree, he is able to make a good living. Soon he has to choose between making an even better living and defending the poor of the city (and he him- self had been born poor) who cannot pay. He chooses the latter course. To his Euro- pean wife, he seems to be growing more and more Egyptian—degenerating, as she thinks, from his English days. The break between them at the end is so inevitable, and so little loss to either, that it is hardly tragic. Ahmed has chosen Egypt. Morelle has chosen France. The story is readable, but not “compelling”.
A FLOCK OF BIRDS dy Kathleen Coyle (DUTTON. $2.50)
Tuis story of how a woman passes the few days from the time of her son’s death-sen- tence to the day of his hanging is suffused with pain and poetry. The scene is Dublin, and the year 1919, during the Black and Tan régime. So it is no ordinary convict and no ordinary mother who hold center-stage for the brief time covered by the book. Every- thing is done to save the condemned man. All Ireland is aroused. His young fiancée, his sister, his brother, his friends, are all feverishly at work. But Catherine Munster, his mother, seems emotionally paralyzed. She can do about as she has always done, and think almost the same thoughts and beyond is a depth of despair and suffering waiting for her. Instinctively she defends herself from actually taking in what is happening to her most-loved child and to her own life.
The nervous tense style is suited to the psychological matter of book. With Mrs. Munster our minds turn hither and yon— to hats and dogs fand household linen— rather than to think too long on the young man with the shaven head, sitting in the foul-smelling death-cell. The book is full of finesse and is intricate in its detail. Although in no way a copy of anything, it recalls the work of Virginia Woolf.
A FAMILY THAT WAS by Ernest Ray-
mond (APPLETON. $2.50)
Two girls and three boys make up the very English “family that was”. It is a pre-war family, for the story stops with 1915. The remote, unhappy woman who is the mother, the wordy rector of St. Austin’s who is the father, are little more than background for Keating and Joyce and Derek, Peggy and Tony. But the story is principally of Tony, the youngest. His boyhood, adolescence and early manhood are reviewed with delicacy, perception, perhaps with too great tenuosity.
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He is a good boy, idealistic, protected and almost perennially young—essentially as young at twenty-four as at four. It is hard to realize that men the age of Tony have been, in other civilizations, great generals, captains of clipper ships, scholars. Life opens up slowly to the young man but it leads him nowhere. He goes further and further into a gentle disillusionment—disappointment. Things are not as he would wish—neither men nor women, nor poetry, nor God. He has married the one girl he wanted most, he is pretty successful at his teaching, yet noth- ing means much to him; he sees life, pale and wan, stretching before him. And then the war. “I’m grateful to this war for one thing at least,” he says on his way to the Front. “It has suddenly drawn life in a larger manner for us.”
WHILE GONDOLAS PASS dy Helen Mackay (appLeton. $2.00)
As THE title suggests, this is a story of Venice. The gondolas pass with their gay, wealthy foreigners, but what of the sons and daugh- ters of Venice—too poor to ride in the ex- travagant “blackbirds” of the canals? Such a one is Za-Bi—which is a diminutive of her nickname, Zampetta Bianca, “little white paws”. As a child she had fastidiously dis- liked dirt. That is why she was thus nick- named. Poverty and fastidiousness are cruel masters of a girl’s fate. Za-Bi, herself a child, is left in position of mother to a considerable brood of brothers and sisters. They become the absorbing passion of her life. For them she slaves as a servant in a hospital, then in a hotel on the Lido, without ever having enough clothing to keep warm or enough food to satisfy hunger. In the one place, she is loved by a student, in the other by a young waiter. But her poverty, her fastidiousness, her responsibilities all work against her hap- piness. The story is strictly sentimental—but if one can not be sentimental about a beauti- ful young girl’s sad life in Venice, when can
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
one be? Told always from the slant of an older woman visiting now and then in Ven- ice, the sentimentality seems an integral— perhaps charming—part of the story.
ESTHER FORBES
APPLES BE RIPE dy Llewelyn Powys (Har-
COURT, BRACE. $2.50)
Curis Hoxsecu issued from the hand of God into a world that was bent on keeping up ap- pearances. The pantheistic son of an Anglican clergyman, he wooed and won to wife a girl of Hellenic physique and quite Victorian prejudices—who cringed from his hearty earthliness as from something that was beastly and un-English. Adela was lovely, but Adela was adamant; her training and tradition in- sisted that English country gentlemen must not behave like laborers to their wives. And as Adela’s forbidding stand was bolstered by stolid and opinionated relatives and friends, poor Holbech, whose patience was broken, walked out under the stars one night with only a serving maid and his own honest lech- ery for company.
It was the last the community saw of him alive.
But Holbech with wind and rain on his face, walked and worked his way up and down the countryside, playing a little tune on a pocket flute—to the music of which Mr. Powys has set some very lewd lines—making love in the shadow of hayricks, and tasting to the full the natural pleasures of being alive.
In course of time Chris Holbech died, and his eyes were like high windy places. His bones were set stiffly in the earth to sprout and blossom.
Llewelyn Powys has cultivated his under- standing; he suffers fools gladly. His way with the Philistine is calm; his rebuke is tempered. He is of those who look for no paradise not of this earth; who aspire to no ecstasy not compounded of things of the present. And in this slight novel he has again stated his case.
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SHEPHERDS IN SACKCLOTH dy Sheila Kaye-Smith (1arpers. $2.50)
Nor since we read Joanna Godden has a novel by Sheila Kaye-Smith touched us more poignantly than this latest romance of hers— Shepherds in Sackcloth. Once more she uses as background that countryside, deep pas- toral Surrey, which is as surely hers as mod- ern London is Galsworthy’s. For stage she takes a shabby rectory with its garden and its environs, and throws upon it the interwoven story of young love—passionate, forbidden, doomed—and the inner religious conflict of an old English priest. Quietly, with exquisite characterization and perfect rhythm, her peo- ple, the sweet and holy rector and his wife, Theresa of the flaming hair and the child’s heart, George, the strange ungainly revivalist who cannot resist the appeal of Theresa’s loveliness, move with classic tread to inevi- table tragedy.
There is never in this writer's work any- thing sensational either in her premises or in her story’s development. But then, there is nothing sensational about the progress of most human lives as they are lived off the front pages of our daily press. Here, in this book, as in millions of spots on earth, the business—pitiful and gorgeous—of daily ex- istence is established. The design of the plot forms itself out of the very soil with appar- ent unconsciousness. This, of course, is the acme of fine technique. Theresa, sacrificing her life for the ecstasy of a scarcely compre- hended passion, is a figure that stands out clearly defined. She is real. We feel, as we read, a desire to protect and warn her—no small achievement for any author. The theo- logical controversies which form part of the problems of the two men—the rector, and George, the “vagabond shepherd of a flock of goats”—cast interesting sidelights on the unceasing questions which harry the Church of England; and on all counts the author’s religion is tolerant, human, wise, and adds to the novel an atmosphere of substance and
significance. Sheila Kaye-Smith, an English novelist of the highest rank, is a person to be thankful for, and one whose compassionate criticism of life deserves wide consideration.
LYNN ANDERSON
THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER éy Vernon Bartlett (stoxEs. $2.00)
Tue co-author of Journey’s End knows war at its truest. He knows its brutish boredom and futility, its senseless monotony and perverse- ness. In The Unknown Soldier—a finely con- ceived and in spots succesfully depicted trage- dy—he has chosen a nameless hero to typify the countless millions of unheroic ordinary beings who carry on its business.
Architectonically the work is simple. The hero is ordered to lead a raid on a German trench to capture some prisoners. While prep- arations are in progress, a German private falls into the hands of an English patrol. The raid is called off. But the cancellation order reaches its final destination three minutes after the raiding-party has gone over the top with- out the customary protective barrage. The hero, gravely wounded, awakens in a shell- hole where he must wait until dusk to be picked up by his men. The long agonizing wait provides the psychological background on which, as upon a screen, the hero’s con- sciousness, his memories, reactions and ra- tiocinations are thrown.
While yet a child the hero was told by a gypsy fortune-teller that “the great men of the world would bow down before him”. His one ambition had been to fulfil that prophecy. War taught him the crushing truth that “the individual does not count”. Yet at every in- stant, even amidst the cruel insensibilities of war, the individual is forever preoccupied with himself, his dreams, his fears, his illu- sions about his destiny. It is this that gives our hero the strength and courage to antici- pate his rescue. After sundown he drags him- self over to his trench, is mistaken for a Ger- man and shot by his own comrades. The
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nameless hero, by implication, becomes the Unknown Soldier, the embodiment of anonymity, of impersonality, of sacrifice, be- fore whom, indeed, the great of the earth bow down. But above this tragic irony of fate it is suggested that the Unknown Soldier is a fiction which civilized creatures have invented to gain vicarious atonement for and absolution from their personal blame in an ungodly and inhuman business.
LOUIS RICH
THE PATRIOT’S PROGRESS by Henry
Williamson (puTTON. $2.50)
Tue World War has been presented to us, in the past two years, from all angles—as it was seen in France or Gallipoli, in Russia or South Africa, in the trenches or from the air, accord- ing to the points of view of privates or sub- alterns, aviators or orderlies, nurses or non- combatants. When the saturation point in war literature will be reached, or if it has already been reached, one does not know. But it seems certain, at any rate, that this really fine war novel by Henry Williamson has been brought to birth much too late to receive the attention it manifestly deserves. In spite of the clarity and competence with which Mr. Williamson approaches his subject, the reader can hardly be blamed for finding this Odyssey of a Brit- ish private faintly repetitious.
John Bullock, the unheroic and common- place hero of The Patriot’s Progress, is a Lon- don clerk, an honest and unimaginative youth who hastened to enlist at the outbreak of the war for fear that the hostilities might end be- fore he had had any fun. Insignificant and rather stolid, he permitted himself to be shunted through bewildering months of train- ing, without questioning in his own mind the essential wisdom or justice of anything which fell to his lot. He learned physical hardship, humiliation, the loss of his personal privacy. In France he endured the strain of uncertainty and the emotional ravages wrought by the more or less constant immi-
nence of death. He went through a nightmare of a hopeless attack, was wounded, and had a leg amputated in a field hospital. Restored to a mockery of health, he was sent back to Eng- land on crutches.
The effect of the war upon his healthy, un- inquisitive animal organism is horrible and inescapable. Neither a hero nor a coward, equipped neither for reflection nor revolt, John Bullock remains a perfect epitome of the commonplace, a median line drawn through humanity’s dead level. His tragedy lies, in part at least, in his very uncomplaining in- comprehension of his own tragedy. Told with a cold, unsparing objectivity, his story achieves a power which would have eluded a more purple writing. But the final touch of the book, magnificently and artistically conclusive as it is, is nevertheless out of character. On Armistice Day, an officious gentleman, inquir- ing into the loss of Bullock’s leg, says to him: “We'll see that England doesn’t forget you fel- lows”. Not unkindly, but with crushing brev- ity, Bullock replies, “We are England”.
MARGARET WALLACE
HYMN TO THE SUN by Malcolm Ross
(SCRIBNER’S. $2.50)
Tue coast of Labrador associated vaguely with Eskimos and missionaries, seems hardly the locale for any sort of grand passion, yet Mr. Ross has managed to make it very much a land of human emotions.
Were it not for the setting, the story would lack any unusual quality, for the plot itself is the eternal triangle, a married woman, her husband and “the other man”. In Labrador, however, the conflict becomes a struggle of man against nature, as well as man with man.
Tom Steele, yachting with friends along the Labrador coast, sees and immediately falls in love with the young wife of the mis- sionary doctor. She is lonely, and in a weak moment responds to his kiss. After a dis- agreement with his host, Steele makes su- perhuman efforts to leave the yacht and re-
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turn to the doctor’s station. When he realizes the folly of his undertaking it is too late to turn back, and he follows the hospital into the interior, at the risk of his life, to be with Louisa Grahame. The outcome of his effort to win her from her husband is not certain until the end of the novel. Long before that is reached the reader feels that he, as well as Steele, has become acquainted with the bitter country, has known its harshest moments and has felt its glamour.
The sympathies of the reader shift from Steele, who knows what he wants and goes blindly after it, to the doctor, certainly the better man, and, at the end, back to Steele. Louisa fails to materialize into a definite per- sonality. The novel has moments of high drama; at no time is it dull. The story moves along in as swift a fashion as though it were not set in an ice-locked land where there are no taxis, newspapers or the modern con- veniences for love-making.
LOVE BY ACCIDENT by Louis Marlow
(DOUBLEDAY, DORAN. $2.50)
Tuart tragic causes often have farcical effects might be taken as the theme of a book which, with a jacket by Peter Arno, a title fit for a light Broadway show, and a hero whose eva- sions of the advances of the opposite sex are grotesquely ludicrous, is as strange a mixture of the comic and serious as even life can present.
Mr. Marlow’s ointment is so smooth that one really does not mind the fly. In fact, given such flies, and novels are full of them, they are not bad at all, taken with this recipe. Which is an indirect way of saying that this combination of pleasure and busi- ness is far from disagreeable. For business it is, there is no question about that. Tony Buckram, in his middle twenties, is as big a problem as ever was blamed, e pluribus unum, upon the war. For Tony, instead of being over-sexed, as is the greater part of the post-war generation in literature, has sex
impulses so easily deflected that he is at once a despair to his men friends and a challenge to the women.
Mafalda, the vivacious young widow, was flattered when Tony entered her bedroom. “My sheets,” he explained; “they’re so cold and damp. Yours look so snug, I wonder if .. .” “Cer- tainly,” said Mafalda kindly, taking one of the pillows from behind her and putting it by her side. This was quite a new approach, she thought, most engaging. “Of course,” she jested, “you could always sleep in your blankets.” “By Jove,” said Tony, “so I could.” So he went back to his own bed and slept in his blankets.
Has Tony merely no sense of sin, or does he lack energy for coming to grips with life, as a friend suggests? The explanation is in- terpolated in chapters concerning Tony’s boy- hood, when, growing up during the war, he faced problems too big for him: a father hated for his pacifism, a brother who kills himself because he is diseased, and the overthrow of all stable impressions.
He had to keep himself numb, you see. But it was numbness; it wasn’t atrophy. He was able all right, under his numbness. That must have frightened him sometimes. A secret and im- mense conviction—did he have that?—that the more actively you went for life, and the more you’ took of it, the worse it was for you.
It is hard to say whether this theory would stand up under a psychiatrist’s diagnosis. Mr. Marlow, however, has tried an experiment that is interesting and refreshing. The com- bination of seriousness and humor is effec- tive and the author has once again proved himself a good student of human nature.
MYRA M. WATERMAN
GREAT SEA STORIES OF ALL NA- TIONS. Edited by H. M. Tomlinson
(DOUBLEDAY, DORAN. $5.00)
Tuere have been collections of sea stories before, but never one to stand with this. In its eleven hundred pages lovers of the sea, and of adventure (true and fictional) will
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find over one hundred and sixty selections from the literature of more than a score of countries, including everything from Jonah’s voyage to Conrad and Masefield. Miss Eliza- beth D’Oyley, to whom Tomlinson passes the palm for the actual making of the collec- tion, is to be particularly congratulated on the high literary quality of the whole volume. So intelligent and so comprehensive are her selections that Great Sea Stories of All Na- ticns will probably remain for years a classic in the realm of sea books.
In his introduction, a spirited essay on the joys of remembered adventures and the magic to be found in sea stories, Tomlinson ex- presses the hope that this book will lure read- ers back to its sources, to the works of the novelists, explorers and adventurers from which it is drawn. It will certainly lure those whose nostrils dilate at the smell of the sea on the printed page. Besides passages they may already cherish, such as Moby Dick’s last fight, Marlow’s triumphant lifeboat com- mand, from Youth, and the gunner’s fight with the carronade that had broken loose in Hugo’s Ninety-Three, they will find in- numerable tales and narratives that are new to them, and discover too that Britain and America are not the only lands that have mastered the sea in literature, that have bred a race of sea heroes.
The editors have naturally included more tales from Great Britain than from any other country, ranging through the whole course of history from Beowulf and Hakluyt to Marryat, Stevenson and Conrad. The pub- lishers, however, have been slightly overzeal- ous in featuring the name of McFee on the jacket and title-page, since no story of his appears in the collection. Only three other good British writers of the sea have been omitted: William Clark Russell, whose Wreck of the Grosvenor is a minor classic; Rex Clements, whose Gipsy of the Horn is well thumbed by every sea lover; and Kip- ling who, judging from a word in the intro- duction, would not permit anything of his
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to be used. But while their absence may be re- gretted, readers cannot with justice complain, and will not, I am sure, when they sit down to this rich feast of sea lore and literature. The volume is well worth adding to anyone’s library.
WILLIAM HOWELL WELLS
THE TRIUMPHANT FOOTMAN dy Edith Olivier (vixinc. $2.50)
Miss Otvier’s book comes as a relief from the many novels that try to be serious and fail. The author sets out to write light fiction and succeeds.
Alphonse Biskin, of French and Cockney English parentage, starts life adventure-bent. Successively as artist’s model, servant of a Spanish grandee, footman and private secre- tary of Mrs. Lemaur, sole legatee of the lady he served, and finally bogus French count liv- ing in an English manor, Alphonse is enabled both to satisfy his craving for spectacular ex- citement and to acquire the savoir faire that gives verisimilitude to his various impersona- tions.
Through the central figure of one absurd situation after another, Alphonse Biskin is hazily sketched. Because of his shadowy quali- ties, the story is not so amusing as it should be. The method is too objective, and the scenes are frequently flattened by narrative when action and dialogue would sharpen the effect. A more careful delineation of Alphonse himself would heighten the reader’s interest in the situations he produces. The value of the novel, therefore, is distinctly more cinematic than literary. On the screen its presentation would be highly diverting. Mirabelle de Bis- que, whom the gay Alphonse marries, is also shadowy.
Three of the minor characters, however, are delightfully drawn: Mrs. Lemaur who “fidgeted like a piece of torn wall paper” as she lay on her sofa, “squeaking like a mouse and with a mouse’s view of life”; Mrs. Le- maur’s husband, the Captain, who arranged
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his life in such a way as to keep his wife from “getting tired”; and the poor little Count Pendini, for whom specimens of but- terflies filled the place of wife and child.
The structure of the plot is good. Having ascended rung by rung, Alphonse is sitting on the top of his little ladder with Mirabelle be- side him when Nemesis in the form of the Count, who had suffered because of Al- phonse’s first impersonation, overtakes the hero. Alphonse, the gay deceiver, is forced to confess to his bride that he started his career as a flunkey. Mirabelle, however, playing into the hands of her creator, is delighted to dis- cover that she has married an unblushing ad- venturer—and the story ends on a high note of happiness.
The author has re-created the atmosphere of the nineties skilfully. The garish furniture, with its coverings of plum-colored velvet, the jewellery worn in dazzling quantities, the costumes, the coiffures, and the elaborate, though decorous, social gatherings are depict- ed accurately and entertainingly. The Trium- phant Footman can be recommended to those in need of an evening’s recreation.
EUDORA RAMSAY RICHARDSON
TATTER’D LOVING by Phyllis Bottome
(HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN. $2.00)
Tue insatiable, beautiful and fragile Vera Middleton, divorced from Sir William and married to his best friend Edward, discovers after thirteen years that her life is not com- plete without Ariadne, daughter by her first marriage. But Ariadne cannot be appropri- ated, nor can Vera forgive herself for intro- ducing youth—and a rival—into a childless household. Eventually she bows down to other truths. Tatter’d Loving is pitched in a key both worldly and ethereal. Strauss and Debussy. Truth and Beauty. Ariadne’s Tom is the most delicious description in the book, and the polite clash between Tom and Vera the most effective exposé of Vera that the author could have invented. “A large for-
midable animal not sufficiently tamed” was Tom, “too big for the room”, to whom the doting mother, with her cruelties in showing up his crudities, seemed invisible. “Once or twice his eyes fixed themselves on Ariadne with the expression of a good dog watching for the signal which precedes a walk. He wasn’t going to hurry her but he hoped she would give him the signal soon.”
Miss Bottome’s subtlety, her brilliant force, her exquisite grace and impeccable taste, the calm astuteness which identifies so many of her previous books, are all here.
CLARICE LORENZ AIKEN
THAT OTHER LOVE by Geoffrey Moss
(DOUBLEDAY, DORAN. $1.00)
Once upon a time Geoffrey Moss wrote De- feat, a volume of short stories about post-war Germany which were exceptionally promis- ing. It was a promise unattended by perform- ance. His novels have been tedious affairs, which approximated roughly to a devitalized English clubman’s version of Flaming Youth. That Other Love represents some advance. It is the story of a young woman’s passion for an older one, and is treated with decency and restraint; moreover Vera Caswell, the older woman, is not unlike a living person. The other characters never come alive, and with the features of their death we are too familiar. That is Geoffrey Moss’s trouble—he presents a surface identical with that of a hundred other novels, mostly written by Englishmen, where the difference of plot and character is the merest accident; a surface competently exe- cuted and with some pretence to cleverness, but which, one feels, somewhat thinly covers that chaos which Milton called “the vast inane”.
THE ANVIL dy Gustav Frenssen. (Houcu- TON MIFFLIN. $2.50)
Two special characteristics mark The Anvil —organization and caricature. It is a very long novel, crowded with characters, but there is
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no jostling or confusion. For Frenssen is a peasant of Low Saxon origin, writing about Low Saxon peasantry and near-peasantry, and his novel is informed with that peculiar rhythm, closely related to the movements of days and seasons, which seems to be in- separable from genuine peasant life. Frens- sen’s presentation, again, is not unlike that of Charles Dickens (one might go further and say that astonishing comparisons can be drawn between them), because, like Dickens, he is a caricaturist. You notice the same repe- titious insistence upon one characteristic at the expense of the others, the same blend of sentiment and cruelty; and if Frenssen’s char- acters have a more noticeable angularity, it is because he is handling a cruder material, and because caricature—the sort of caricature, I mean, which as far as English is concerned scarcely survived Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta—comes naturally to him as a German. With Dickens it was artificial and urbane. The central theme of The Anvil is the de- velopment of Otto Babendiek from the
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blacksmith’s son of Stormfeld in Schleswig- Holstein to the novelist of international repu- tation. The first half, which deals with Otto’s childhood and adolescence is something of a masterpiece. Otto is less hero than inter- preter. Through his passionate interest in hu- man affairs we see the melancholy, secrecy and physical vigor of a whole race. In the second half, which deals with his marriage and war experiences, Otto becomes the hero, the peasantry of Schleswig-Holstein retires into the background, and The Anvil abruptly declines into merely a good story. As a cari- caturist, certainly, Frenssen gives us a picture of war which is not unlike a Simplicissimus cartoon, a gaunt picture of starvation urged into some sort of movement by the constant invasion of sudden death. Nevertheless, he begins by unfolding a great story and ends by offering an ordinarily good one, because he cannot resist making a virtue of his weak- ness—and his weakness is something not un- like garrulity.
GEORGE DANGERFIELD
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BIOGRAPHY
THE LATER YEARS OF THOMAS HARDY: 1892-1928 by Florence Emily Hardy (MACMILLAN. $5.00)
Mrs. Harpy’s second and concluding volume carries the biography of her husband from the publication of Jude and his disgust at its critical reception through the later years of fame and quiet devotion to poetry. It was a life of few external events; and Mrs. Hardy has wisely given much space to excerpts from Hardy’s diary and letters. Her wisdom is the greater inasmuch as her narrative style is to say the least uninspired; and as concerning her personal relations to Hardy and knowl- edge of the intimacies of his character she has maintained a reticence doubtless estimable, but disappointing. She gives simply the bare record of facts, anecdotes and documents. Thus, though dull as narrative, the biography is invaluable as a source book.
Through the bare record we get glimpses of the man. One quality that is notable is his love for all the arts, shown by his constant visits to galleries, attendance at concerts and reflections on poetry; by even his delight in dancing, as an old man, the intricate steps of his childhood. His continual interest in old churches, partly explained by his architec- tural training, and his deep love for church music are evidence of a strong inclination toward the esthetic aspects of religion. He once regretted that he had not taken orders as he had planned in his youth, and several times Mrs. Hardy records his wish that the services of the Church of England might be reformed so as to be intellectually as well as emotionally acceptable. Indeed, in comment- ing on the hard names he had been called— atheist, infidel, pessimist, etc.—he is quoted
as saying that he might have more plausi- bly been called “churchy”—“not in an in- tellectual sense, but in so far as instincts and emotions ruled”.
Most valuable to the critic are the records of Hardy’s thoughts about his work, par- ticularly about the philosophy underlying The Dynasts. A similarity to the thought of Schopenhauer, which Mr. Ernest Brennecke has studied, is here further manifested. Be- lieving like the philosopher in an unconscious “Will” of the universe as the ultimate reality, Hardy advances in The Dynasts to a fancy which partly justifies his claim to being not a pessimist but an “evolutionary meliorist”— the fancy that this Will, unconscious origi- nally, is growing aware of itself. He also fancies that individuals may have a “limited” freedom of action at times when “all the rest of the Great Will is in equilibrium”. But alas, for such fancies! The great war, according to Mrs. Hardy, “destroyed all Hardy’s belief in the gradual ennoblement of man”.
Hardy early accepted as fact man’s oneness with the natural world, as science assumed it; but his intellectual creed came into conflict with his imaginative sympathy, resulting, as Robert Shafer has pointed out, in a painful contradiction throughout his work. And his life, though passed in quietude, friendship and the greatest honor, was darkened by moods of bitterness and stoic despair. His last intellectual act was to ask that this quatrain be read to him:
Oh, Thou, who man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev’n with Paradise devise the Snake: For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken’d—Man’s forgiveness give—and take!
ALAN REYNOLDS THOMPSON
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LORD MELBOURNE by Bertram New-
man (MACMILLAN. $4.50)
Ir HE was not a great statesman, in the ordi- nary meaning of the term, Viscount Mel- bourne, Queen Victoria’s first prime minister, was certainly a most lovable one. He was never a popular national figure, for he lacked those ostentatious qualities which appeal to the popular imagination; and he had no great talent for creative statecraft. But be- hind his languid, well-bred manner and his paradoxical speech lay a fine judgment, a cool, analytical mind, and a heart which was very certainly far from cool. Profoundly sceptical of the social order which he repre- sented, Melbourne devoted himself disinter- estedly to its preservation, and while his achievements were not of an enduring order the facts remain that he kept his government together for nearly seven years, and that he guided England through one of the most trying periods of her political history.
The Lamb family, of which Melbourne was a younger son, was neither old nor illus- trious, but it had managed in the course of two or three generations to accumulate a fortune and a peerage. Melbourne was not a favorite of his father, a fact which lends color to Greville’s story that he was actually the illegitimate son of the glittering Earl of Egremont. However that may have been, his prospects were glowing enough, for he was endowed not only with wealth and position but with a very considerable personal charm. His marriage with the beautiful, eccentric Lady Caroline Ponsonby provided him with the most advantageous parliamentary con- nections, but turned his personal life to trag- edy. Lady Caroline’s liaison with Byron, and the publicity which attended it, the deaths of two of her children and the hopeless im- becility of the third, might permanently have embittered another man than Mel- bourne. But that he was not embittered is demonstrated by the mellowness of his humor and his tolerant, unfailing sympathy.
The material of Melbourne’s life offers considerable temptation to the sensational biographer, and Mr. Newman deserves great credit for his careful, impartial and admir- ably discreet treatment of it. Under his hands the Victorian premier emerges as a human, recognizable, and more than ordinarily ap- pealing person.
MAZZINI’S LETTERS translated by Alice de Rosen Jervis with an introduction by Bol- ton King (button. $2.40)
In a pay so soundly practical as ours, these letters by Giuseppe Mazzini have a decidedly unfamiliar and archaic flavor. Selected from the vast correspondence of the most indus- trious of all Italian patriots, they reveal the mind and heart of an intrepid idealist, of a man whose belief in the moral principles of the universe was profound and important enough to work and starve and fight for end- lessly. Mazzini was a man of wide learning, of deep religious convictions, and of sincere human sympathies. But he rigorously subor- dinated these qualities to his active concept of duty. “A man’s business is not to save his soul, not to lead a passively good life, hardly even to write and preach ideals if his work stops at that, but to translate every thought of good, come what may, into action. The moral man cannot be sundered from the practical or political man.” Thus Mazzini, physically frail, and at heart a gentle and humanitarian phil- osopher, transformed himself, by the strength of his moral purpose, into a tireless and im- placable revolutionist.
These letters, many of them exceedingly beautiful in expression, have been excellently chosen for the American reader. Addressed to his mother, to Giuditta Sidoli, the woman he loved, to his political associates, both Italian and English, to George Sand in France and to Ernst Haug in Germany, to Jane Carlyle, Daniel Stern, and many others, they reflect completely both Mazzini’s public life and his private mind. But always, and for what-
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ever purpose they may have been written, they manifest that clear, implicit, and somewhat touching faith which was the guiding prin- ciple of Mazzini’s life. “For people in gen- eral,” he wrote to Eleonora Curlo Ruffini, “life is a question of happiness or unhappiness, a strife against inevitable sorrows . . . therefore they give and accept the common consolations of necessity, time, and what not. They all look upon life as something human, and it is all very well for them; but you and I look upon life as something divine, as a mission, and nothing short of that.”
JOSEPH FOUCHE: THE PORTRAIT OF A POLITICIAN dy Stefan Zweig (viKine. $3.50)
Steran Zweic has chosen for his latest study a figure from the French Revolution—a half- forgotten figure, fascinating in the manifold contradictions of his character and in his studied and self-willed obscurity. It is hardly remarkable that Joseph Fouché’s contempo-
raries found him incomprehensible. Even now his career appears unimaginably devious and incalculable; and his biographer, with all the records at hand, has experienced obvious difficulty in piecing together a coherent ac- count of it. Yet the temptations of the theme are undeniable. Almost any reader would wish to know more of the man of whom Napoleon said, “I have known only one really perfect traitor, Fouché”, and of whom Balzac said, “He had more power over men than even Napoleon”.
There was nothing heroic in the character of Joseph Fouché, save perhaps the heroic stature of his villainy. Like Talleyrand he was a churchman, but unlike Talleyrand he was a very obscure one and entered the arena of the Revolution by way of a tiny political club in Arras. Fouché always awaited the is- sue of an event before concluding his own allegiance. He ranged himself in the first National Convention with the moderate fac- tion, going over to the Mountain when it
finally became clear, from the energy of the popular demonstrations, that the radicals were destined for success. The mild cleric cast his vote for the death of the king and was rewarded by a revolutionary proconsu- late. At Lyons he became one of the bloodiest of the Terrorists, rivalling by his wholesale executions the work of Carrier at Nantes. Governments changed and political factions crumbled, but Fouché remained. His only party was the majority. Serving this master or that one, and betraying each of them in turn, he held office under the Directory, the Consulate and the Empire. When the Bour- bon succession was restored, we find the erst- while plunderer of churches, the mitrailleur of Lyons, the Napoleonic Minister of Police, blos- soming forth as an ardent legitimist, and one of the wealthiest noblemen in France. Notwithstanding Stefan Zweig’s intent and colorful exploration of Fouché’s character, we never see it quite clearly. Certainly we are never admitted to the secret of Fouché’s power. Zweig portrays him as a rat-like monster, silent and implacable, content to work in secret, to enjoy the substance rather than the aspect of power, and to control his superiors through fear. Yet he does not ex- plain the man who embraced the glittering and slightly ridiculous title of Duke of Otranto, and who finally ruined himself in the effort to obtain a more desirable minis- terial portfolio than the one he already held. Still, if the riddle has not been resolved for us here, we must nevertheless admit that it has been propounded uncommonly well. MARGARET WALLACE
EUGENE V. DEBS: A MAN UN- AFRAID by McAlister Coleman (GREEN- BERG. $3.50)
Tere is a dogma abroad to the effect that it is the right of every man to have his biog- raphy written once by a friend. Despite the fact that Debs has already had this service done him, Mr. Coleman repeats the eulogy
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and depicts the famous socialist leader as a little higher than the angels.
Unquestionably there was something ad- mirable about Eugene Victor Debs. His sin- cerity, his dynamic personality, his persuasive oratory, his large and winning kindliness— all these were real enough; they shine through much of the war-time slander which described him as a villain and a monster. But excess of these very virtues was the reason for Debs’s radicalism and his ultimate failure. The sight of human suffering hurt him and he set out to correct it without attempting to discover whether it deserved to be corrected. From the very real suffering of railroad men working under a system which was blood- thirsty to the humanitarian uplift that at the end was so large a part of Debs’s socialism, there is a leap from worthy work to a thor- oughly unsound philosophy. As we watch Debs’s passage from organizer of the railroad unions to Socialist candidate for president, we can see the weakness of that creed which extends sympathy for the patently mistreated to humanity at large.
Mr. Coleman has written a thoroughly partisan and uncritical study. He has done it as a labor of love and with evidence of great personal admiration for his subject. And while the book will help even more to deify Debs among the socialists, the unprejudiced reader will wonder repeatedly how any man could have been so good, so long suffering, and so politically wise as Mr. Coleman’s Debs is represented to be. The biography of the real Debs still remains to be written—if, of course, it is worth the trouble.
ALAN BURTON CLARKE
FRANCIS JOSEPH I, THE DOWNFALL OF AN EMPIRE by Karl Tschupptk (1ar-
COURT, BRACE. $3.75)
Kart Tscuuprix’s book is a biography of Franz Joseph only in so far as the career of the Emperor entered into the history of his country. What the book really is is a his-
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
tory of Austria-Hungary from 1848 down to Franz Joseph’s death, and on the whole a very fair and moderate history. Tschuppik does not make Franz Joseph either a hero or a devil, but simply a Hapsburg with all that that name implies, summing him up in these words: “Francis Joseph ruled in opposi- tion to the tendencies of the times. Against the external forces threatening his empire he pitted the traditions of his house”.
And yet with it all the Austrian Kaiser was not altogether a hide-bound conservative. Bitterly as he must have resented it, he found that after his defeat in 1866 he must com- promise with the democratic spirit of the time, if only to keep his House from being swamped by the Hungarian aristocrats, and his internal policy up to 1914 was on the whole enlightened. Though with his death came the real end of the House of Hapsburg, and though his acceptance of the war with Serbia sealed the fate of his country, Tschup- pik presents him not as a leading spirit in the conspiracy but as giving in somewhat doubtfully to the importunities of Conrad von Hotzendorf and Count von Berchtold. Franz Joseph was neither a warrior nor a blood-thirsty potentate, and perhaps he was less responsible for the execution of the patriots of 1848 than this book asserts. He had his blame in this as he had for the declaration of war against the Serbs, though Tschuppik fails to record what is now gen- erally believed to be true—that he signed the order for the attack under Berchtold’s false statement to him that the Serbian army had already crossed the Danube.
But the real value of Tschuppik’s book lies not in its study of Franz Joseph as a char- acter nor as a philosophic discussion of the reason for the fall of the Hapsburgs. Its value is in its concise account of the events which occurred in the Austro-Hungarian Empire between 1848 and 1914, though sometimes, as in the account of the war of 1866, these events are recounted too concisely for those not already conversant with the facts. There
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are also numerous well-etched pen-portraits of the important figures of the epoch, and an admirable study of the young Emperor’s entourage—an entourage which was largely responsible for the unfortunate events of his early reign. It is a book which will not be neglected by those who wish to know what occurred in this tragic country during its latter years, though those who desire a pro- found knowledge of the period will consider it but as a primer.
BRIAND, MAN OF PEACE by Valentine Thomson (coVvIcI-FRIEDE. $5.00)
To BELIEvERs in race and heredity the figure of Aristide Briand is of extraordinary interest. The Frenchman Briand is neither a Latin nor a Teuton—he is a Celt. It is no mere co- incidence that the careers of the Premier of France and the Ex-Premier of England, David Lloyd George, should so closely have paralleled each other, and that they should have found themselves understanding and sympathizing with each other’s position in the effort to build up a new Europe. The Latin is apt to be a doctrinaire; the Anglo- Saxon, for all his sense of justice and his ability to see the other fellow’s position, often possesses a certain rigidity of temperament which hobbles his very real desire for neces- sary compromise. More flexible by nature, and—despite his mystical trend—more cyni- cal of human endeavour, the Celt is often able to harmonize where the Latin or Saxon alienates. This power of harmonization has been the secret of the Breton Briand’s suc- cess and in large measure that of the Welsh- man, Lloyd George’s. Yet it is probable that history will give a larger homage to Briand than to Lloyd George. Despite his apparent abandonment of some of his early socialistic principles, Briand has never really proved false to his belief in the common man. He has had to fight with the weapons at hand a battle of peculiar difficulty in a nation al- ways nationalistic perhaps beyond all others.
Left to Briand, the Peace would have been a very different affair than it is even at pres- ent. His friendship with Stresemann shows the real man, and his recent appeal for a federated Europe proclaims again the breadth of his mental and spiritual horizon. Perhaps it is true that in a federated Europe Briand sees a safer position for France itself, but to charge, as some of his enemies have, that his appeal has been made solely to solidify the status quo is ridiculous.
Mile Thomson’s life is a very readable book, and one which will be consulted when the true biography of Aristide Briand is written. It is the story of a woman who knew the Breton statesman well, and who liked him, perhaps at times to the exclusion of the man’s real nature. Mlle Thomson is the daughter of Gaston Thomson, who has been a minister in many of Briand’s cabinets. She is quite frankly the admirer and what is most valuable in her book are the intimate details of Briand at home and among his friends. Her picture of him as always essen- tially the peasant is sympathetic and true. The Frenchman, unlike the Englishman, the German, and perhaps sometimes our own countryman, is rarely a snob, and Briand re- mains in her pages proud of having sprung from the soil and, like Clemenceau, is hap- piest when in his leisure moment he is en- abled to return to it. Mlle Thomson of course sketches the public life of her hero, but it is really only a sketch. It is not the statesman but the man chez lui whom she makes us see.
GRENVILLE VERNON
STRESEMANN dy Rudolph Olden (put- TON. $3.00)
STRESEMANN is one of the great figures not alone of post-war Germany but of post-war Europe and it is still far too early to calculate the full import of his championship of the policy of fulfilment and reconciliation with France. Historical perspective is impossible in
a biography appearing so closely upon the
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death of its subject. But unfortunately this life of the great German statesman is also dis- appointing in other ways. Stresemann seldom comes alive; he remains buried in a tangle of German politics, and we know little more of him after finishing Herr Olden’s book than could easily be learned from the most super- ficial study of his public statements and newspaper account of his career.
The transformation of the nationalistic and belligerent Stresemann of the war period to the conciliatory statesman of Locarno and Geneva is explained by Herr Olden as a con- quest of realism over emotionalism. Strese- mann first had to find himself before he could win the power and influence which enabled him to carry through that sound policy which he realized was the only course open to Ger- many if she hoped to regain her pre-war standing. But once having set himself to the task of winning a settlement of the reparation problem and evacuation of the Rhineland, he allowed nothing to turn him aside. He consis- tently acted upon the principle that despite defeat Germany was entitled to negotiate on equal terms with the Allies and he always maintained an absolute confidence in his country’s destiny. Stresemann was a great man and deserves a biography which will both interpret his character and determine his place in history. It is still to be written.
FOSTER RHEA DULLES
SETH HARDING, MARINER by James L. Howard (YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS. $3.00)
As autosrocraPpHy Seth Harding, Mariner is scarcely successful, though it does manage to limn the rather bleak profile of an energetic, cautious Yankee by narrating his exploits and disasters as master of privateers and as commander in the Continental Navy. Mr. Howard has been more faithful to the sec- ondary title of his book, “A Naval Picture of the Revolution”.
Harding had an adventurous and at first highly successful career as commander of
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
three ships equipped by the State of Con- necticut. Later he commanded the Confed- eracy for the Continental Congress and after a series of triumphs fell on evil times; his ship was dismasted and later captured by the British. He was paroled, exchanged, and took out the Diana, a letter-of-marque, in which he was captured a second time and again exchanged. He ended his career as a naval officer as second in command to Barry on the Alliance and helped fire the last shot of the Revolution.
In the course of his civil career misfortune dogged him and he was even imprisoned for debt. Finally he petitioned Congress for recognition of his services and twenty-five years after the signing of the treaty of peace was awarded a pension.
The book while carefully written seems ill-proportioned, with more than half as many pages of index as text, and suffers from a lack of focus, as though the author were uncertain of his aim in writing it. But there is no doubt that it contains much matter that will prove valuable to students of Revolu- tionary times.
ROBERT L. ROE
MOLIERE dy H. Ashton (purron. $2.50)
In tus day of fictionized biography Pro- fessor Ashton’s Moliére is so notable an ex- ception that one is tempted to ask, “Que diable fait-il dans cette galére?” The present study, one of the “Republic of Letters” series, is avowedly written both to inform the ordi- nary reader and to purge him of whatever false notions he may have been led to cherish through the efforts of legend-mongers and writers of theses. An ample bibliography dis- arms the cavillers.
Of Moliére the man the author has little to offer that is new. The fault, however, is not with Professor Ashton but with the lack of existing documents. The facts of the dramatist’s life are presented without undue color, if also without sparkle, but whatever
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is said, is authoritative. The exacting reader might have wished for a little more light on the marriage of the forty-year-old playwright to a girl scarcely out of her teens, who for generations has been believed his illegitimate daughter by Madeleine Béjart. Professor Ash- ton comments upon the mystery but goes no further, for although he would have the mis- informed reader believe Moliére was not guilty of incest, he does not advance either proofs or arguments of sufficient weight to dispel the current notion or to fix Armande’s paternity. Again the fault lies in the meagre- ness of material evidence.
Professor Ashton is at his best in the criti- cal chapters which, though they savor of materia scholastica, contain lucid analyses of Moliére’s comedies, establish them as objec- tive and not autobiographic creations, and give a just valuation to a dramatist in whose ballets even a king did not scorn to take part.
MARY GLADSTONE: HER DIARIES AND LETTERS edited by Lucy Masterman
(puTTON. $5.00)
A VERITABLE Open sesame to a not so distant yesterday is Mary Gladstone: Her Diaries and Letters, edited by Lucy Masterman, an amusing collection of reminiscences that
cover the Victorian period and approach us as closely as 1924.
A bright, observant girl of unusually keen perceptions, a sense of humor and few reti- cences was Mary Gladstone, later Mrs. Drew, the fifth child of the English statesman. These early qualities, so essential to the recorder of diurnal events, never forsook her through the whole of her long life, so that the end, like the beginning, of her book is full of lively, entertaining, first-hand glimpses of events and personalities. A lover of the Victorian will treasure such bits as: “A long, dreary walk with Carlyle at a funereal pace”, or, “Found myself on a sofa talking amicably with George Eliot ... with her great strong face, a mixture of Savonarola and Dante. Mr. Lewes rather obtrusively en- thusiastic, I thought”, or this: “At a dinner Browning and Tennyson hurled ridiculous epitaphs at each other”. Of course Disraeli, or Dizzy, her father’s political opponent, is not treated with any great kindness, and it is with relish that she sets down Browning’s improvization:
We don’t want to fight, By Jingo, if we do, The head I'd like to punch Is Beaconsfield the Jew. FRANCES WINWAR
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MRS. GRUNDY dy Leo Markun (app.eton. $5.00)
Tuts book, containing six hundred and fifty pages of text, is an attempt to present a pop- ularized history of American and English morals during the four past centuries and to give briefly their classic and modern conti- nental backgrounds.
Mr. Markun has written much that is amus- ing and informing; he has eschewed the pe- dantic and made perhaps a contribution of doubtful value to our knowledge of human vagaries. The sheer volume of his work is im- pressive. It might be counted a virtue if one could ignore the fact that he has rehashed for use here certain of his contributions to the Haldeman-Julius books. In its style, this simple, blunt and unadorned statement of pe- culiar fashion in personal behavior has the virtue of simplicity at the same time that it comes dangerously near monotony.
Beginning with the assumption that Mrs. Grundy is a mythical good dame who knows at any moment what is decent and what is not, Mr. Markun recounts a vast number of conflicting types of behavior in various times, and shows, as everyone knows, that Mrs. Grundy is pretty much of a fool.
As one of the debunkers, Mr. Markun takes pride in the completeness of that list of “mor- als” which hopelessly contradicts itself and which to him is mere grist for his mill and the butt of his indirect laughter.
But there is little explanatory material in Mrs. Grundy. There are no wit, no style of consequence, no observations drawn to in- dicate what the reader is to make of the mam- moth study. The book plods, plods wearily in its recital of local and impermanent cus-
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toms, and in many places is more a simple history than a study in “morals”.
Without being told as much we gather from the general tone of the book that Mr. Markun believes he is writing actually about morals —morals of the British and the Americans. And the book leaves one with the impression that morality is a matter of geography, the calendar and popular whim. Perhaps the au- thor, if asked, would say as much.
Obviously Mr. Markun has been writing about mere conventions of a social, religious, and sexual nature. Seldom in the course of his history does he approach any real ethical center in discussing a mode of behavior. He is content to point out some stupid and dis- carded rule of conduct, to call it a question of morality, and then to ridicule it by setting it beside the present fashion in behavior.
Mrs. Grundy is a diverting book, not for the scholar, but for the average reader who may need to be told that manners differ in different times and that each time has con- sidered its code of social conduct one of supreme ethical rightness.
ALAN BURTON CLARKE
ROOSEVELT: THE STORY OF A FRIENDSHIP by Owen Wister (macmit- LAN. $4.00)
Tue secondary title of this book is neces- sary to an understanding of its content. It is in truth the story of an almost lifelong friend- ship between Owen Wister, a man of letters with a wide knowledge of American condi- tions, and Theodore Roosevelt, an almost mythic figure to present-day readers. This story, and especially the conversations record- ed with moving fidelity, cannot fail to be of
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interest even to those who never saw the au- thor or his hero. To me, who knew them both and many others of those described, the book is keenly interesting.
Wister, who met Roosevelt at college, be- gins with a vivid picture of the small pale youth in a boxing match, appealing to the crowd in favor of his antagonist, and ends with a description of the great ex-president’s last days at Sagamore Hill. Between these two events, he gives us many glimpses of the man America greatly loved and highly hon- ored. Like Wister I had many talks with Roosevelt, and many letters from him but few on political subjects and none of course in the spirit of camaraderie which their com- mon youthful experiences gave to those which this book contains. As I closed it I carried this as the main distinction of the characterization: knowing the boy Roosevelt, Wister has kept that boyish quality alive in all that he writes of the man, a perception which can be maintained only by one who has played with the boy and recalls beneath the gray hair the visage of youth. That per- ception was denied me although to the end of my acquaintance with Roosevelt I carried the memory of the young commissioner of police whom I first met in ’96.
There is danger in a characterization, based on a boyish acquaintance, but Wister does not permit it to belittle his subject at any point. He brings out at times the youthful quality of Roosevelt but never to the lowering of his essential dignity. As he himself says, “T took no liberties with him”. He shows also and very plainly that these boyish humors were, after all, only retrospective flashes, and he emphasizes once again the fact that this “impulsive” president was accustomed to make the most careful preparation before he jumped, a fact which Lawrence Abbott made clear in his story of Roosevelt’s preparation for his celebrated speech to the English peo- ple on his return from Egypt.
The volume is crowded with figures of na- tional interest—Elihu Root, Leonard Wood,
Henry Adams, John Hay, Gifford Pinchot, Taft, Jusserand, Mrs. Roosevelt, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, John La Farge, and many others of social or literary or political eminence. To one who knew all or most of these figures Wister’s analysis of “the tennis cabinet” is of especial interest. I am inclined to think that this is the most valuable of all the chapters of the book. His picture of Sen- ator Lodge is finely just; so is his judgment of Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. His Henry Cabot Lodge is the man I knew, the historian seated among his books, the intel- lectual aristocrat, the finest senator of them all. His dignity, his clear and concise English and his grace in debate are here touched upon. Root too is nobly presented, and Pin- chot, as I knew him, the chief man of our newly-developed system of forest conserva- tion.
Of the controversial part of the book I do not feel called upon to write. The author is sure of his ground and sets forth his con- cepts with calm authority. Mainly his com- ments are agreeable to mine, although I might not have had the courage to set them down.
HAMLIN GARLAND
THE ADAMS FAMILY by James Truslow
Adams (LITTLE, BROWN. $4.00)
ToceTHER with a masterly understanding of their New England background, Mr. Adams brings to this interpretative sketch of the members of four generations of America’s most distinguished family a keen sympathy for their character and their temperament. He is not himself related to the New England Adamses, but in his attitude toward American democracy, his feeling for England, his his- torical interests, he is intellectually very much akin to them. This does not prevent him from clearly recognizing their limitations nor in- duce him to disguise the gradual evolution of the independence and moral integrity of John Adams and John Quincy Adams into the
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aloofness and snobbishness of the fourth gen- eration, but gives him an unusual insight into the forces which formed the Adams point of view and served to direct the careers of the different members of the family.
There is no attempt to give full biographical treatment to any one of them, and, consider- ing them as individuals, Mr. Adams adds lit- tle either in the way of fact or interpretation to what we already know. His interest in them is as a family which first sprang into promi- nence when something mysterious occurred in the blood or brain of a long line of village yeoman and lifted it “to a higher plane, from which it has never descended”. If we may doubt that the fourth generation of Adamses truly maintained either in character or in in- tellect the level reached by John Adams, and question even more the ability of the present representative of the family, who does not enter into this book, it is still intensely inter- esting to have brought out so clearly the com- mon characteristics which have distinguished the family in each generation and have given it its unique place in our history.
It is Mr. Adams’s thesis that with each suc- ceeding generation the development of our democracy made it increasingly difficult for an Adams to play the rdle to which his char- acter and ability entitled him. John Adams and John Quincy Adams could become presi- dents, although their independence of party prevented them from serving second terms, but thereafter the political system made it vir- tually impossible for any member of the fam- ily to hold high elective office.
By the time we reach the fourth generation —John Quincy II, Charles Francis, Jr., Henry and Brooks—the scene which had been so admirably adapted for the display of the tal- ents of John, John Quincy and to a lesser de- gree Charles Francis, had changed so greatly that writing rather than political action was the most logical career open to them. Mr. Adams also recognizes, somewhat reluctantly, that the weight of the past was beginning to settle on this latter generation, but he ascribes
an importance to Henry’s books which places him in the front rank of American historians, biographers and even novelists.
Mr. Adams has not altogether maintained the high standard he set for himself in his history of New England, and The Adams Family is at times somewhat slow-moving and uninspired, but it is a book which throws an interesting sidelight upon American his- tory as well as affording us a keen and on the whole highly judicious interpretation of the interaction of the Adamses and their chang- ing environment.
W ASHINGTON—LINCOLN— WILSON by John McAuley Palmer (pouBLEDAY, DORAN.
$5.00)
Tuis is not a comparative biographical study of the three war statesmen from whom the name of the book is derived. It is a discussion, often highly technical in nature, of prepared- ness as exemplified in the war experiences through which these three great presidents passed. Brigadier General Palmer has discov- ered a treatise on the defence of the United States written by Washington, and it was be- cause this important legacy was not trans- mitted to them, in the author’s opinion, that both Lincoln and Wilson “were doomed to bear the grievous burden of unprepared war- fare”.
Further than this it is the Washingtonian policy, as opposed to the policies based upon the military researches of General Emory Upton, toward which the United States is at last turning. His plan was for an effective regular army supplemented by a national guard, instead of a skeletonized regular army and a centralized federal volunteer force. Brigadier General Palmer is a zealous advo- cate of the Washingtonian Plan and the bur- den of his book is that a choice must be made between the two military systems and, once made, effectively carried out.
If the Washingtonian Plan had been in force in 1914, he states, we would have had
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a national guard of 600,000, mobilizable with- in a few days to a war strength of 1,200,000. There would have been 1,400,000 graduates of this force within military age scattered throughout the country. This citizen army would have been well trained, well equipped and well officered. “Could there have been a war of autocratic reaction under these condi- tions?” the Major General asks. “If America had done her part toward keeping the world safe for democracy, could it have been neces- sary to fight a war to make it so?”
Washington-Lincoln—Wilson is an interest- ing, instructive, and well-argued tract in favor of preparedness along the lines of Washing- ton’s citizen army. It is based upon the sound- est historical research. But the implications of its title are in no way fulfilled and the three war statesmen are but symbols in the history of military policy.
FRAGMENTS OF A POLITICAL DI- ARY by Joseph M. Baernreither (Macmit- LAN. $5.00)
Tue author of this diary, which has been edited with a brief biographical sketch by Dr. Joseph Redlich, was a statesman of the Austro-Hungarian empire whose political in- terests led him to make a special study of the South Slav question and of his country’s for- eign policy in Southeastern Europe. It is not evident that he exerted any great influence in the conduct of that policy, but his accounts of his travels throughout the empire, and in Serbia and Roumania, and of his talks with political leaders from Berlin to Bucharest, do reveal how certain Austrians foresaw the dan- ger which their country was facing through its heedless policy toward the subject races of the empire. “If things go on as they are with us,” Baernreither wrote on June 4, 1914, in the last entry of his diary which is reproduced, “the ground will slip from under the feet of Imperial authority.”
There is far too much political detail to make this book of great interest to the gen-
eral reader and its value is largely restricted to the student of European diplomacy. He will find it replete with evidence of the dan gerous position in which Austria-Hungary found herself in 1914 and of the hopelessness with which the liberals watched the mount- ing tide of internal discord and the Govern- ment’s—especially Berchtold’s—failure to ap- preciate the necessity of conciliation at home and abroad.
THE OTHER SIDE OF GOVERNMENT by David Lawrence (scriBNER’s. $2.00)
Mr. Davin Lawrence is probably better equipped to write on those multifarious ac- tivities at Washington which he has called “the other side of government” than anyone else in this country. He has had long and in- timate acquaintance with men and affairs at the capital, and much experience with the actual workings of departments, bureaus, and commissions which may not be so well known to the public as Congress, but whose achievements stand far higher. Consequently it is decidedly disappointing that useful and interesting and readable as Mr. Lawrence’s book is, it should still be so superficial in many of its chapters, so incomplete, and at times so evidently a product of hasty and careless composition.
The best chapters are those dealing with the activities of the Department of Com- merce in studying business conditions, work- ing toward the elimination of industrial waste, insuring full measures through the Bureau of Standards, and handing out in- formation. The most unsatisfactory are those on such larger topics as the Supreme Court, the President’s Power or Foreign Policy. The latter chapter makes no attempt to in- terpret the process by which our foreign pol- icy is determined and executed, but departs entirely from the book’s real character by giving a brief, valueless resumé of recent in- ternational events with a few bromidic com- ments on peace and war.
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564 A NEW ECONOMIC ORDER edited by
Kirby Page (HARCOURT, BRACE. $3.00)
Tuere are no less than twenty-four contribu- tions to this symposium on modern economic questions. The first part of the book com- prises a series of debates on capitalism, fas- cism, communism and socialism; the second section a series of articles on such specific questions as social insurance, workers’ educa- tion, government control of industry, taxation, public ownership and consumers’ codperation. Many of the contributors are familiar writers on economic subjects; others less well known are students in specialized fields.
With very brief space allotted to the individ- ual contributors due allowance must be made for the difficulty of confining discussion on such controversial topics to single chapters. Some few of the writers rise above such handi- caps and their articles are both provocative and packed with information. But the tone of the book as a whole is superficial and journal- istic. Especially in the first section of debates the treatment of socialism, communism, capi- talism and fascism is obvious and inconse- quential. Any real contributions to our under- standing of these social forces are few and far between.
The natural place for these brief articles is in the magazines. In a book we have a right to expect more substance than is possible when a great deal of matter is spread out so very thinly. Occasionally symposia are satisfac- tory, but far more often, as in the case of this one, it is difficult to understand the value of their publication.
FOSTER RHEA DULLES
BLACK MANHATTAN by James Weldon
Johnson (knopr. $2.50)
Brack Manhattan enters as a rich, ripe element into the mosaic that is cosmopolitan New York. Mr. Johnson shows how success- fully the Negro Metropolis, like the color which it represents, has absorbed all the
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
shades of the spectrum of white man’s civili- zation, urbanity and self-appraisal. While the volume is not meant to serve as a com- pendium on what Africa has contributed and in turn owes to the New World, yet the cumulative impression after reading it is one of amazement at the thoroughness with which in the comparatively short period of three centuries the Lybian slave has ac- complished the difficult and devious process of evolution from savage to savant that it has taken his Aryan brother so long to achieve.
Few cities boast such loyal adherents as New York, and few citizens take such genuine, naive pride in their community as do the Negro residents of Gotham. It is their love of the great world-city with its freedom, gaiety and incitements to individual distinction and mass acclaim that has sus- tained them in their struggle against slavery, that has helped them to withstand the furies of racial persecution, that has aided them in surviving economic and social discrimina- tion, that has impelled them to reject Black Zionism and the appeals of a philanthropic, political separatism and has encouraged them to seek means of expressing their natural talents and endowments.
And New York provides a fitting setting for this luxuriant upshooting of a race. To do that it has had to yield up one of its most beautiful and healthful sections—Har- lem. Just how the conquest has proceeded; the notable imprint which the Negro has left upon the activities that give New York its metropolitan character; his influence in the realm of sports, amusements, art, Bo- hemianism, night-life; his delightful and contagious joie de vivre and ability to ex- tract enjoyment from the simplest diver- sions—all these and other pertinent things are recorded in Mr. Johnson’s book with ex- emplary lucidity, dispassionate scholarship and critical discernment. The author’s treat- ment of the subject proves that the quality of being “New Yorky” is more than skin
A VARIED SHELF 565
deep, irrespective of whether the skin is dark or light, and makes every Gothamite share in the feeling of attachment which his black concitoyen has for New York.
LOUIS RICH
GLEANINGS IN EUROPE by James Feni- more Cooper (OxFoRD. $3.50)
Tuts volume is the second in a series of re- prints of Cooper’s European travel impres- sions, edited by Robert E. Spiller. Of all the American novelist’s letters, these from Eng- land are still, as they were a century ago, the most interesting. Cooper found English so- ciety vastly more stimulating than society on the Continent, partly because the common language facilitated a free exchange of ideas, but more, doubtless, because of the peculiar feeling which existed between England and America. In England, the War of 1812 was still a fresh memory; and not all the national antagonisms aroused by the Revolution had been forgotten. As for America, it was at once anxious to assert its cultural independ- ence of England and painfully hypersensitive to any criticism.
Thoroughly cosmopolitan in his views, Cooper was nevertheless one of the shrewdest and most tactless commentators who ever lived. He meant, by his observations upon English ways, merely to correct his country- men where he felt that correction was needed; but he succeeded instead, to the great detri- ment of his subsequent fame, in infuriating them. With the English he fared little better. As he himself justly remarked: “There are two things that every American should un- derstand. In associating with the English, if he betray the least of the toad-eater, he is despised for the meanness; this is human na- ture; if he manifest self-respect, and a deter- mination to have all the rights of a gentle- man, he is hated for presuming to be an Eng- lishman’s equal”. Cooper, although aware that he came from a country inferior in stand- ards of taste and conduct, felt himself to be a
gentleman, and the equal in breeding of any Englishman who walked the earth. As a re- sult, he evoked from the English a grudging
respect, but seldom tolerance or affection. However uncomfortable his unsparing com- ments rendered both himself and his contem- porary readers, they are far more interesting and valuable to us because of their frankness. Unlike most itinerant writers who obtain ad- mission to the society of foreign capitals, Cooper was little given to gossip; he was con- cerned rather by manners and morals, and his intelligent generalizations, if less racy, for in- stance, than the chatter of Nathaniel Parker Willis, are infinitely more absorbing. Cer- tainly their republication here, useful as it is, is less a service to scholarship than a contribu- tion to the enjoyment of the general reader. MARGARET WALLACE
CONFESSIONS: A STUDY IN PATHOL- OGY by Arthur Symons (care & SMITH. $2.00)
Tue eighty-seven pages which make up this book record a period of insanity which Mr. Symons passed through: one wonders, hav- ing finished them, why this record was ever written, and then begins slowly to realize that if the author had not been acquainted with Nerval and with Arvéde Barine’s Né- vrosés, it never would have been written. For his interest in pathology is purely literary; it is imitative; and it is the occasion for creat- ing some splendid sentences. These confes- sions, moreover, are partly digression—either critical and enforced with the tritest of quota- tions, or autobiographical when it becomes obvious that the author is trying to “spit out the butt-ends of his days and ways”, but is too much of a gentleman to spit. In these days this must be accounted unto him for right- eousness, but it makes the book, whether as a study or an entertainment, singularly tedi- ous reading.
As a document, however, Confessions
should be bought by everybody who is inter-
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566
ested in literary survivals. In the first place there are all the indications of an earlier Symons—a man, that is, of considerable deli- cacy of taste, widely read in several lan- guages, and definitely a poet; not a critic, however, but a rhapsodist, and in his prose generally a confirmed inhabitant of the nine- ties. Speaking of Watteau in this book he uses the phrase “old age of roses”, a phrase which exactly fits his own prose. The roses, of course, are the Wilde-Pater-Dowson roses, candied or waxen, and now a little dusty and discolored with time. We must admit that the nineties which created them had their value; they found English literature some- thing of a sloven and taught it an excellent lesson in deportment; and English literature, having learned its lesson, has departed, leav- ing Mr. Symons, an elderly dandy, still using the same fashions, the same postures, and the same intonations. At least two of the most eminent of English critics have stopped on their way long enough to tell him that style for style’s sake is decadence and that evil is only good so long as it is considered as evil—but he has refused to listen. Of himself he says that he was born “not only a Fiend hid in a Cloud but a serpent of sorts”. The Fiend of course is not Blake’s, but rather the ideal of Mr. Symons’s generation, and the
serpent is “the deaf adder that stoppeth her ears’.
MY THIRTY YEARS’ WAR éy Margaret
Anderson (covicI-FRIEDE. $4.00)
Tue success of the modern autobiography de- pends upon the keenness of its author’s per- ceptions of other people; and this dependence is so absolute that it constitutes an abrupt de- parture from anything that was being done so near in time as ten years ago. Its outward signs are the profession of good talk as an art in itself, and a precise examination of the mechanics of living; two things which ex- press a definite activity on the part of intelli-
gent society, and which mark, probably
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
enough, the beginnings of a new literary form. Such beginnings were easily discernible in Music At Midnight by Muriel Draper, and now re-appear in My Thirty Years’ War, two books which are likely to set the standard for future autobiography.
Apart from glorifying conversation and the Mason-Hamlin piano, My Thirty Years’ War concerns itself with three things: The Little Review and those who had the privilege of being associated with it; Jane Heap, and the curious strophic-antistrophic co-editorship without which The Little Review might have died of infantile paralysis; and Margaret An- derson’s conversion from the re-active to the active life, which occurs at the end of the book but colors the whole of it; so much so that, for the proper understanding of it, this book should be begun at the end and read backward. Margaret Anderson has a genius for rapid portraiture, a remarkable power of selection, and an egocentricity which prevents her from experiencing other people as fully as she might.
The real significance of this book, however, lies in its manner. It is in a good tradition. It is worth remembering that the extraordi- nary development of Restoration English prose can be directly attributed to conversa- tion and science, a favorable conjunction nev- er repeated, or likely to be repeated, in Eng- lish history. It is just possible that American literature is developing under very much the same conjunction. For the effect of a new science upon prose, let anyone read the new psychological treatise; to the effect of con- versation upon prose, My Thirty Years’ War and Music At Midnight are significant testi- mony. While Muriel Draper’s is a better book, since brilliant maturity is more effective than brilliant immaturity, both have this in com- mon—a personal style, fresh, unselfconscious, vigorous, but formal, which is singularly im- portant, not only as an achievement in itself, but as an indication of what good talk may yet, by the grace of God, do to the body of
prose within the lifetime of us all.
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A VARIED SHELF 567
THE OUTLAW YEARS by Robert M.
Coates (MACAULAY. $3.00)
Mr. Coates is a wise man: this is better than doing surréaliste “Conversations” for transi- tion, and better than The Eater of Dark- ness, though it is too clearly a library compilation to represent a solid achievement. Moreover, when fact out-Herods the Herod of romantic fiction, the result is always a lit- tle depressing; and this book, in whose hard light even Deadwood Dick begins to pale, is too heavily charged with repeated beastly murder to be even “very tolerable unpleasant reading”. None the less, in these four stories of the five great American outlaws who ter- rorized the old Spanish frontier a hundred years ago, you are permitted now and again to observe more closely than usual those de- tails which attend the obscure birth of legend. Take the case of Micajah Harpe, the homi- cidal maniac, and terror of the Natchez Trace. He was beheaded alive as he lay with a bullet in his spine. “You are a God damned rough butcher,” said he in the midst of the operation, “but cut on and be damned to you.” Or the case of Hare, the cold-blooded dandy, who was fatally delayed on a journey by the vision of a white horse standing across his path. “I think this white horse was Christ,” he said. This sort of detail is invalu- able, and there is just enough of it to make The Outlaw Years an unusual book. But, what is more to the point, if the sober and forceful quality of his prose is any indication, Mr. Coates will one day be doing far better things than this.
GEORGE DANGERFIELD
WAR, POLITICS AND RECONSTRUC- TION by H. C. Warmoth (MacMILian. $3.50)
Tue last surviving governor of the Recon- struction period in the South looks back from the high summit of eighty-seven years over the scene of the storms in which he had an
active part with the serenity that becomes his age. His experiences in the war as an officer on the Northern side were uncomfortable and brought him no honors; his adventures in politics were bloody and distracting. He had to sit on bayonets in office and contend with evils laid, he says, most unjustly at his door. Four years (1868-72) in the executive chair of Louisiana gave his name a place among the “carpet-baggers”. This definition he disclaims, as, although hailing from Illinois, he was of Virginia lineage, of German origin via the migration that came to New York and Penn- sylvania from the Palatinate, but he willingly admits he might have been a “scalawag”.
His reminiscences recall the cordial fore- gathering of the Union and Confederate sol- diers, and the manifestations of helpfulness toward former adversaries, which were cut short when the politician and adventurer took the place of the soldier. He denies that Negro domination was a fact during his term of office and reminds his readers of the very influential creole class in his state, though revealing what most men have forgotten, that a group from Santo Domingo backed a daily paper in New Orleans to sustain a movement in favor of establishing Louisiana as a colored commonwealth. His memories fill in some chinks where history is faulty. Most interest- ing of his notes is the too-brief account of the celebrated race up the Mississippi be- tween the steamers Natchez and Robert E. Lee. He was a chance passenger on the latter. The reader will learn with surprise that this noted flyer was the property of Oakes Ames —the Massachusetts shovel manufacturer who fathered the Crédit-Mobilier scandal— and his New Orleans associate, Asa S. Mans- field. To other distinctions Mr. Warmoth adds a credit, which he evidently relishes, of believing himself to be the only man (he was then Collector of the Port of New Orleans) who ever told the redoubtable Theodore Roosevelt, Civil Service Commissioner at the time, to “go to the devil”.
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THE WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD by Apsley Cherry-Garrard (pia.
PRESS. $5.00)
ApsLey Cuerry-Garrarp’s The Worst Journey in the World, is an account of the 1911-13 Scott South Polar Expedition. It includes the Depot Journey, the terrific Winter Jour- ney in search of Emperor penguin embryos, and the fatal Polar Journey, in which Scott and his four companions lost their lives, the death of the last three being due, as Mr. Cherry-Garrard points out, to ignorance of proper diet: they were too exhausted to make the final twelve miles to One Ton Depot.
Told without literary device or any affecta- tion by a man who is a scientist, an explorer, perhaps a good deal of a hero, but never by any chance a littérateur, this book succeeds in being one of the most thrilling and ab- sorbing narratives in modern literature, and makes Byrd’s journey by airplane to the pole seem no more harassing than a train trip from Albany to Troy. It is as packed with suspense as a mystery story, as tragic as a Russian novel, and as full of information as a text-book. It is absolutely convincing. Merely as a first-hand account of the terrific suffering that men will endure to add a fact to scientific data it is inspiring. It is illus- trated with drawings and sketches made under the most adverse conditions by Wilson, and is supplied with maps and an index which make it clearly comprehensible to the lay mind. Much of the text is drawn from let- ters and diaries of Wilson, Scott, Bowers, and others of the expedition.
ROBERT L. ROE
CRUCIBLES by Bernard Jaffe (stMon & SCHUSTER. $5.00)
DisTINGuIsHED as the winner of the Francis Bacon Award for the Humanizing of Knowl- edge, Crucibles bids for the reader’s atten- tion under the handicap of a comparison
with Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters.
THE BOOKMAN for AUGUST 1930
Fortunately, the book overcomes the handicap by virtue of its own excellence. It presents a splendid series of biographies, in which the development of chemistry is traced through the careers of those men who devoted their lives to the science.
Mr. Jaffe tells us of Trevisan, who spent his life in pursuit of the philosopher’s stone, whereby he would be able to transmute baser elements into gold. He tells us of that un- paralleled faker, Becher, whose theory of phlogiston befogged research in chemistry for many decades, yet finally turned the at- tention of his colleagues and disciples from the fabrication of gold to the formulation of theories explaining natural phenomena. He tells us of the brusque Paracelsus; of Dalton, who sponsored the atomic theory as we know it today; of Berzelius, who brought about the standardization of chemical symbols. Others follow in review, all brilliantly etched, all evaluated with restraint—Cavendish, Lavoisier, Avogadro, Mendeléef, the Curies, Thomson, Moseley.
In presenting these men of the laboratory, Mr. Jaffe avoids a purely chronological ac- count of their lives. He engages the reader’s interest by opening almost all his biographies with illuminating episodes in the lives of his subjects, or picturesque quotations from their writings, and succeeds in presenting understandable pictures of them and clear conceptions of their significance in the growth of chemistry out of alchemy to its present status among the sciences.
Through the lives of most of Mr. Jaffe’s subjects runs the thread of the search after truth—the explanation of the universe. In an epilogue, the author takes up a position in the shadow of Eddington and Jeans, ex- pressing his opinion that we may be as far from such an explanation as the fiery Trevisan who, dreaming one night of a king who revealed to him a magic formula disclos- ing the secret of all things, arose to cry in be- wilderment, “I do not understand!”
IRVING ASTRACHAN
A VARIED SHELF 569
THE FUTURE OF DRINKING dy Gilbert Seldes with drawings by Don Herold (urr- TLE, BROWN. $2.00)
Tuts book is more serious than it looks; the comic-strip illustrations and the frivolous typography mislead one a bit. It is an essay on American post-Prohibition drinking habits, written with wit enough, and contain- ing a fair number of interesting observations and an equal number of high-class platitudes, but it is neither profound enough nor funny enough to be absorbing.
It consists principally of a brief history of the Temperance movement, an exposition of the decline of the art of drinking well, an indictment of the speakeasy as a place of entertainment, and an over long dissertation on present-day drinking habits in urban America. There is a great deal of obvious description of people’s fatuousness and banal- ity, of their lack of individuality and spirit and grace, in connection with their drinking. But these qualities have been exposed and ex- posed and exposed, and Mr. Seldes’s remarks seem no more new and shining because they
concern only a single and perhaps somewhat neglected part of George F. Babbitt’s life. As to the future of drinking, Mr. Seldes confesses that he is a bit vague. He is in- clined to think that drinking will tend to diminish and disappear in many strata of society. He points out that it does not fit very well into the scheme of living of the Amer- ican bourgeoisie—but he is much too glib about it. He makes the critic’s common error of considering only the man whom he sees, and ignoring the inarticulate, frustrate man inside, for whom liquor captures a little of the ecstasy, the fine frenzy of living, which he once expected and has never given up hoping to find somewhere on his pedestrian way. Mr. Seldes’s neglect of this consideration makes his pretensions to more than super- ficiality seem empty, and his prediction of the decline of middle-class drinking mere snob- bery. His topic is too much tied up with the whole question of American personality and all that lies behind it to permit of such treat- ment in anything short of a hilariously funny book—which this certainly is not. ROBERT S. JOSEPHY
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FLEDGLING FICTION
BEGINNING AUTHORS
EALLY!” said the lady to whom one in- adequate reason for my existence had been explained. “So you review first
novels—just the work of new authors! How interesting! Now tell me, just what are our young people writing about?”
I spare you the lady’s italics as I spare you my (unspoken) reply. But her inquiry in- spires reflection. The mildly astonishing fact is that the 1930 crop of first novels displays a quite extraordinary degree of variety. There is as little uniformity of theme as there is of quality; and persons who like to talk about trends and tendencies in contemporary work of any kind would find little support for any theories they may have in the books which lie before me now.
I do not mean that these are books of an exceptional originality. Healthy emulation has had its share in the making of most of them. Scarcely a volume of the present group but owes its existence to a purely literary inspira- tion. It was born of an impulse engendered by other books, rather than of the need to write of something clearly imagined and long lived with. Even the most substantial of the recent first novels—Button Hill by Gordon Stowell (Smith. $2.50)—owes something to the fact that H. G. Wells once wrote Joan and Peter and Ann Veronica and Marriage, that Arnold Bennett wrote of the Five Towns and J. D. Beresford of Jacob Stahl. But no matter. The book has stuff of its own; it springs from the contemplation of a living subject; and its considerable merits are the achievement of its author.
Button Hill is a British suburb, one of those new-made communities which sometimes
57°
awaken in their inhabitants an almost re- ligious patriotism. Such at least it was in the nineties, when those two middle-aged young men, Mendip and Ellersby met as new- comers to the place and solemnly planned the common future of the town and of the children who should inherit it. The chil- dren come and grow up, as does Button Hill itself; but the ones do not inherit the other. Instead there is a war, which leaves few enough of the young people alive; and time and changing conditions work their will upon the town itself, until] even the once- prophetic Mendip moves to a more exalted address. And time deals variously with Men- dip and Ellersby the elders, coarsening the one, refining the spirit of the other, until death makes way with them both and there is an end to them and their plans. That is the story Mr. Stowell tells, with an abundance of detail, sufficient to fill and animate a book of more than average size, with a large gal- lery of characters, most of whom are pre- sented to us clearly-drawn and full of hu- manity, with only a hint of condescension toward his people to mar his workmanship. It is a book of uneven texture, now adroit now cumbersome in its handling, but vigor- ous and honest throughout.
Impressive in a somewhat different way is Mr. Gilmore Millen’s Sweet Man (Viking. $2.50). I am not certain just how much of the undeniable fascination of Mr. Millen’s book is due to the complete unmorality of his characters. Here are people living wholly on the visceral plane. John Henry, the Sweet Man of the story, is a mulatto boy in whom amiability and an unbridled sexual appetite are combined in equal proportions, and the story of his life is the chronicle of a succes-
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FLEDGLING FICTION
sion of amorous encounters, too casual, too easily achieved to be called conquests. Yet there is nothing repellent in this record of his career; his good nature and his utter ani- mal simplicity rob even the final episode of offensiveness. The reader observes creatures from another world and thus is spared a shocked reference to his own kind.
Mr. Millen tells his story vividly and with a total absence of self-consciousness. His back- ground, principally the disorderly district of Memphis, is amazingly alive. It will be inter- esting to see what he can do with a theme less violent in its impact upon the readers’ attention.
I have heard and seen little discussion of the Son of John Winteringham by Warrene Piper (Houghton Mifflin. $2.50), and am led to wonder if it has escaped the attention it deserves. There is so much that is really excel- lent in the book: such polish and assurance, such variety to the people and such really ad- mirable dialogue, that it will be a pity if it does not find a large audience. As a picture of an eccentric family it is bound to be com- pared with The Constant Nymph (which it in no way resembles) nor would I place it below Miss Kennedy’s work in the vivacity with which Miss Piper has drawn her charac- ters. Less quaint than the Sangers the young Winteringhams unquestionably are, and there is a less obvious appeal to the sentiments in their story. No less, I find the story a singu- larly interesting one.
One turns from the purple splendors of the publisher’s description of The Breed of Basil by Thomas Bell (McBride. $2.50), to the book itself with somewhat the same reluc- tance with which one approaches those leg- endary and long absent friends of friends who after years of being praised suddenly appear in the flesh to their own discomf- ture. All these glowing things cannot be true; indeed, they are not. Yet the book itself is an agreeable tale, done a bit after the manner of Mr.
Mr.
Cabell, but not oppressively Bell writes with a jaunty air; his
571
ladies are frail and his men robust. And if the whole is merely a dashing trifle, it is a very graceful one.
More pretentious and less pleasing is Three Half Moons by Stephen Brent (McBride. $2.50), a romance of Alessandro de Medici, which has more than a little of the unreality which almost all historical novels possess. There is effective drama in this, but it is marred by a kind of cloudy poetizing.
Earnest folk continue to write uninspiring novels, usually about life in rural America. The current specimens of this genre include A Prisoner in Babylon by Madeleine D. Strain (Macaulay. $2.00), the story of a coun- try youth, who, orphaned and reared by a brutish guardian, is consistently disillusioned by people and nature itself, until at the end he finds solace in a platonic marriage. Be- yond its serious purpose and one or two vivid scenes there is little to commend in the novel. With Trailing Banners by Estelle Au- brey Brown (Little Brown. $2.50) also deals with disillusionment. As a child Mary Melton becomes infatuated with Bart Hawkins, a well-meaning but coarse-fibred village boy, who after getting one girl with child runs away from the town. When he returns sev- eral years later Mary, despite her friends and her own better judgment, marries him. She endures poverty and the gradual demolition of her ideals for twenty years, but at the end, after her son has beaten a sick puppy to death and she has heard the boy’s father laughing with his son over the latter’s incestuous rela- tions with his half-sister, she decides to leave home and seek happiness elsewhere. And a good thing too.
It is a relief to turn to the wholly capti- vating artificiality of Three-A-Day (Century. $2.50), Dorothy Heyward’s story of small time vaudeville folk. Here Mrs. Heyward gives a very convincing picture of vaudeville life as a background for a sentimental love story. The book is well contrived and equally well told. It is excellent entertainment.
GUY HOLT
THE BOOKMAN’S MONTHLY SCORE
COMPILED BY
FRANK PARKER STOCKBRIDGE, LIFE MEMBER
OF THE AMERICAN
LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, IN COOPERATION WITH THE PUBLIC LIBRARIES OF AMERICA
For the severalth time your reporter is impelled to remark, after surveying the result of the current com- pilation of librarians’ reports, that the taste of the great American reading public for a good story is unerr- ing. Is there any possible list of twelve current novels which would contain a higher percentage of good stories than that appended here? Grant that such a list might contain a higher percentage of literary quality
—though that is open to argument—or of insight
are not the qualities readers seek when they go to the circulation departments of the public libraries.
into the deeper problems of a changing civilization; those
"hey
want good stories, as most of the rest of us do, stories that do not excite them too furiously to think, stories that deal with the lives and experiences of people not too different from themselves, in circumstances in which
they can imagine themselves. And what is great literature, after all, but just that kind of story!
NOVELS
I. CIMARRON 2. EXILE
3. ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT 4. THE WOMAN OF ANDROS
5. THE DOOR
. THE SCARAB MURDER CASE
YOUNG MAN OF MANHATTAN ROGUE HERRIES*
THE GREAT MEADOW
LAUGHING BOY*
7. 8. 9. 0.
I II. CORONET
I2. WHITEOAKS OF JALNA
GENERAL
I. BYRON
5
“<-
3.
4. .. . THE ART OF THINKING
7. GRANDMOTHER BROWN’S HUNDRED YEARS
8. MARRIAGE AND MORALS
9.
NEW WORLDS TO CONQUER THE HUMAN MIND*
THE GREEN PASTURES* JOURNEY’S END
TWELVE AGAINST THE GODS HENRY THE EIGHTH II. MRS. EDDY
TREATISE ON THE GODS
—F. P. S.
Edna Ferber
Warwick Deeping Erich Maria Remarque Thornton Wilder Mary Roberts Rinehart S. S. Van Dine Katharine Brush
Hugh Walpole Elizabeth Madox Roberts Oliver La Farge Manuel Komroff
Mazo de la Roche
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN KNOPF
LITTLE, BROWN BONI
FARRAR & RINEHART SCRIBNER’S
FARRAR & RINEHART DOUBLEDAY, DORAN VIKING
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COWARD-MCCANN LITTLE, BROWN
André Maurots Richard Halliburton Karl Menninger
Marc Connelly
R. C. Sherriff
Ernest Dimnet Harriet Connor Brown Bertrand Russell William Bolitho Francis Hackett
Edwin Franden Dakin H. L. Mencken
APPLETON BOBBS-MERRILL KNOPF
FARRAR & RINEHART BRENTANO & SCHUSTER LITTLE, BROWN LIVERIGHT & SCHUSTER LIVERIGHT SCRIBNER’S KNOPF
SIMON
SIMON
* This title has not previously appeared in the Monthly Score.
From Germany, via Spain to the African Jungle
BY ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE
HE PASSION PLAY at Oberammergau
being a natural magnet for travellers
of 1930, books about Germany have been a conspicuous feature of the publishing season. A number of them have already been discussed in this department. Frank Schoon- maker’s Come With Me Through Germany (McBride. $2.00), is the fourth book in his Traveller’s Series. Like its predecessors it is essentially practical. The descriptive chapters are supplemented by information about itin- eraries, transportation problems, where to sleep and where to eat, where to find out what you want to know, and the highly im- portant matter of the purse.
The sixteenth and seventeenth additions to the Wayfarer Series are Malcolm Letts’s A te gee on the Rhine (Houghton Mifflin. $3.00), and Suzanne St. Barbe Baker’s A ‘ayfarer in Bavaria (Houghton Mifflin.
$3.00). The former book is intentionally lim- ited | in scope, the author confining himself to the river between Mainz and Cologne, his contention being that to continue up-stream to Basle or Strasbourg, or down-stream be- yond Cologne, would mean taking the trav- eller too far from the land of castles and romance and the real beauty of the Rhineland.
The Passion Play at Oberammergau is fea- tured and described at length in 4 Wayfarer in Bavaria. The author is frankly enthusiastic over her subject. To her Bavaria offers every- thing that the tourist seeks; scenery, moun- tains, lakes, and forests; towns with their theatres, operas and concerts; wonderful mon-
| ow BON VOYAGE ono
uments and art galleries rich with historical associations; and little villages full of the ro- mance of the Middle Ages. Liking Bavaria, she also likes the Bavarian people. Her recipe for “brewing” a Bavarian is: “Take all the good qualities of the Austrians and Swiss, add a touch of German, and season with a little
Irish temperament and the light-heartedness of the French”.
Pointing the way to roads leading south is E. Allison Peer’s Spain (Farrar & Rinehart. $3.00). The author of Spain is a Professor of Spanish in the University of Liverpool, who has written much on Spanish subjects, and who spends approximately one-third of every year in the Peninsula. It is his contention that ninety-nine out of a hundred persons who visit Spain for the first time carry with them entirely false conceptions; ideas derived from Victor Hugo, George Borrow, with a spice of Gautier, De Amicis, or Blasco Ibafiez, and flavored with an antiquated edition of Baedeker. The sum total of such ideas is represented by the words brigands, bullfights, guitars, mantillas, castanets, daggers and In- quisition. To counteract such impressions is
Mr. Peers’s task.
Nearly every new book about Spain is written in a spirit of championship, em- phasizing the charms and conveniences of a land that only yesterday was generally held to be a little beyond the pale of conventional travel. An example is Charles L. Preston’s The Roads of Spain (Scribner’s. $3.75). With the intention of finding out just what the motor roads of the Peninsula were really like, the author last year made a journey of five thousand miles in Spain and Spanish Morocco. The book, the story of his adven- tures, reflects his enthusiasms.
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Following roads leading south, cross the narrow strait that separates the Pillars of Hercules to enter Morocco with R. B. Cun- ninghame-Graham’s Mogreb-el-Acksa (Vi- king. $3.50). This book is a reprint, originally appearing in 1898, when Joseph Conrad was among those who warmly endorsed it. Cun- ninghame-Graham, a Scotch baronet of Span- ish blood on his mother’s side, was born in Scotland in 1852, and educated at Harrow. Much of his life has been spent in travel. In his youth he worked on cattle ranches in Texas, and in his young manhood roamed ex- tensively in Mexico and South America. Mo- greb-el-Acksa, written as a record of a jour- ney in Morocco and treating of Moroccan affairs vis-a-vis with Europe, challenged many social shibboleths of thirty years ago.
Shibboleths of today are breezily challenged in May Mott-Smith’s Africa From Port to Port (Van Nostrand. $5.00), the story of an American woman’s girdling of the Dark Con- tinent. For example, the legend of the British tub. It is not a legend in itself, but in what it is supposed to connote. “If proper sewerage and even half up-to-date contrivances were installed in all the British colonies in Africa, and Palestine, and India,” writes Miss Smith, “the everyday wear and tear of life, I am sure, would put on an entirely different as- pect.” In the French African colonies she found water “laid down”. “But those parts of Africa which appear so pleasantly pink-tinted on the maps, denoting British possessions, I found completely free from plumbing con- veniences.” The smartest hotel in Cape Town offered only the jug and wash basin.
Spirited adventure, shrewd observation, and practical guide-book information for those contemplating travel far from the beaten path are features of this book. Miss Mott-Smith decided that she would emulate Vasco de Gama, and conquer the African coast line; begin at Tripoli and go west to Morocco and the Senegal, from there around the elbow of Africa to Cape Town, and so on up the
THE BOOKMAN ADVERTISER
East Coast, with a side shoot off to Mada- gascar, then northwards to Italian Somaliland, and through the Red Sea to Port Said. The book is rich with bits that invite quotation. At a luncheon at Government House in Lagos, Southern West Africa, the conversa- tion turned to a discussion of the play, White Cargo. Those at table condemned the false impression the drama gives to the public of life on the West Coast.
From some one of the ports of Miss Mott- Smith’s book turn inland with Gretchen Cron’s The Roaring Veldt: Adventures in the Wonderland of Big Game (Putnam. $5.00). Here is the story of another adven- turous American woman, who with her hus- band has made four trips into the heart of Africa to hunt and photograph big game. The book is an account of their latest journey, made in the winter of 1928-29, when they were after lion pictures. The safari that took them to the Serengetti Plains of Tanganyika Territory was concentrated entirely upon lions. But true to the new sportsmanship fos- tered by motion-picture hunters, they never shot a lion unless it was necessary.
This book, like Miss Mott-Smith’s book, is one that invites quotation. In the lion king- dom the venturers found the age-old war of the sexes, feminine coquetry, and the vindi- cation of the Kipling line to the effect that the female of the species is more deadly than the male. The male lion nurses his idea of lord- ship, but the female does the work. The lioness kills oftener and more unerringly than her mate. She is flirtatious by nature and it be- hooves her lord to guard her continually from the approach of a rival gentleman. When the husband and the philanderer quarrel about her she looks simply bored, and the con- queror’s attempt to show his affection is met with a rebuking cuff. But should he cease his attentions even for a moment, she is true to the eternal feminine, playing up to him, cuddling against him and nuzzling him until he is won over.
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The guests at Government House at Lagos, as told in Miss Mott-Smith’s Africa From Port to Port held White Cargo to be an ex- aggeration. Dr. Fred Puleston in his African Drums (Farrar & Rinehart. $4.00), does not seem to believe that to be the case. He, too, knows Lagos—inside and out. He says that when you get to Lagos you can well say to the newcomer “You’re in Africa now”; for if there is a hotter place than Lagos this side of Hades he certainly does not wish to see it.
In the matter of White Cargo both Govern- ment House at Lagos and Dr. Puleston may be right. He is writing of events and condi- tions in the 1880's. It was in November 1882 that he left Liverpool for Equatorial Africa as an agent for an English house that paid him a salary of one hundred and fifty dollars for the first year, with a promise to raise it fifty dollars for the second year if he lived that long. The life in its loneliness, its heat, its weakening of the moral and physical fibre of white men suggests descriptions in Kip- ling’s story, “At the End of the Passage”.
It was the success of Trader Horn that moved Dr. Puleston to write the story of his own adventures. As a trader he defends his calling from the attacks of the missionary, whom he regards as well-meaning but poorly informed.
The reviewer, as many readers of this little department have probably perceived, is an old fogy, inclined to praise the travel of the past at the expense of the present. Only a few weeks ago he was grumbling that the new Frascati’s at Havre was not the old Fras- cati’s, and that the maze of Hampton Court was not so perplexing as it once had seemed. As with conditions, books. Something of lost youth, something of “the wharves and the slips, and the sea tides tossing free” comes back with the sight of a new Baedeker in its red binding. Here is Baedeker’s Southern Italy and Sicily (Scribner’s $5.00). Guide- books may come and guide-books may go, but Baedeker will never be entirely replaced.
THE BOOKMAN ADVERTISER
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FRANKLIN EVANS, OR THE INEBRI- ATE by Walter Whitman. Printed by D. B. Updike: The Merrymount Press. (RANDOM HOUSE. $10.00)
Mr. Uppixe’s work does not look as if he knew there was a craze for limited editions and “fine printing”. He was producing beau- tiful books so long before it all started, and his taste is so sure, his craftsmanship so near- ly flawless, his faith in simplicity so strong, that his volumes never have that look of hav- ing been made with one eye on the market which marks so many other special editions these days.
Franklin Evans is a reprint of Whitman’s short novel on prohibition, which appeared in the New World Magazine in 1842, and Mr. Updike has excavated, as only he can, a num- ber of the curious (and in his hands charm- ing) types and decorations of the period for its embellishment.
ALIAS WALT WHITMAN dy Harvey O’Higgins. Printed by Richard W. Ellis: The
Georgian Press. (CARTERET BOOK CLUB. $5.00)
Concernep with the personality of the poet, rather than with his books, this essay was re- printed from Harper's Magazine for mem- bers and friends of the Newark book club. For legibility, and reading qualities in gen- eral, a copy of the original magazine is much more to be desired. One has every sympathy with the desire of collectors for a copy of Mr. O’Higgins’s excellent paper in permanent form, but one must sympathize too with the disappointment with which this edition must have been received. The typography is totally undistinguished, and it is printed in a grayish ink on blue-gray tinted paper, so that it positively defies reading. xvi
CONTEMPORARY ART APPLIED TO THE STORE AND ITS DISPLAY by Frederick Kiesler (BRENTANO. $7.50)
Tuis unfortunate work is written in the ro- coco English that a German youth might ac- quire from a German correspondence school, interlarded amazingly with the magnificent business phraseology of the pre-Mencken, pre-Lewis, pre-Fortune era. The author says that “The fine arts are the sources of the ap- plied arts”. (He must think that prehistoric man was just an artist who got bored with landscapes and figurines and took up china- painting and weaving.) He therefore devotes the first part of his book to a dissertation on painting, sculpture and architecture. Most of the chapter on architecture is devoted to a consideration of the work of a group of which he himself is a member. He dismisses Le Corbusier with a disagreeable remark, al- lots one photograph to Mendelsohn, and ig- nores Mallet-Stevens completely. He eulogizes the left-wing painters and sculptors, and wal- lows in fancy phrases like “cosmic harmony”
and “functional horizontalism” , and such bits as “ ... art is merely the organization of somatic materials into a living unity. A unity created by Man’s powers, not by Nature. There is no mystery in it to the artist. Art either is, or it is not... .”
This pretentious nonsense is followed by what is simply a handbook of ideas and sug- gestions for the construction and arrange ment of show-windows and other store dis- play. To a reviewer who is not also a window dresser this matter does not seem particularly profound, but perhaps it would be a revela- tion to a gentleman in the profession.
The book would be partly redeemed by the interesting illustrations if they had been reproduced less badly, and if the abortive
typography and binding (also the work of
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the author) were not a constant irritation to the reader. The publisher has contributed neither editorial nor technological competence to the volume.
THE BOOK OF CHRISTOPHER CO- LUMBUS by Paul Claudel with decorations by Jean Charlot (YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS. $5.00)
Tus thoroughly fascinating book demon- strates perfectly the contribution which skil- ful typography combined with deft and sympathetic decoration can make to good literature when the text permits. M. Claudel’s exquisite lyrical drama has been printed in a large square octavo; the text in a heavy-faced version of the Jensen letter; the business in the French civilitée type, which is based on the gothic secretary-hand. The Missal ini- tials are printed in a fine red-brown, and the decorations combine this color with blue and black. These latter range from tiny margin sketches to gorgeous full pages, all executed with fine vigor and humor, and arranged with the type into pages of extraordinary charm. The book is not issued in a limited edition, and sells for a modest five dollars. The designer is unfortunately not given cred- it, but if, as is likely, it was Mr. Carl Rollins, one can but wish that more of his work dis- played an equal originality and vitality.
THREE DISCOURSES: Hymen’s Recruit- ing Sergeant, The Drunkard’s Looking Glass, God’s Revenge Against Adultery by Mason L. Weems. Printed at the Harbor Press. (RAN- DOM House. $8.50)
TuesE moral tracts, the work of a go-getter of the 1800’s who combined the gathering of souls for the Lord as a preacher with the ac- cumulation of dollars for himself as a book- agent, are written with the most amazing gusto, verbal gymnastics and unconscious hu- mor. This edition contains an enthusiastic introduction by Emily E. F. Skeel, and re- productions of the original frontispiece plates. The typography is agreeably simple, and not too dogmatically faithful to the period.
THE BOOKMAN ADVERTISER
XVII
LOVE AND THE LUXEMBOURG dy Richard Aldington. Designed by Frederic Warde and printed by William Edwin Rudge (covict, FRIEDE. $10.00)
Mr. A.pincTon’s free-verse poem offered an interesting problem to the typographer, but one cannot help feeling that it has been most carelessly handled. The design is common- place, and the execution lacks that fine atten- tion to detail which one has a right to expect in so expensive a piece of printing—especially when the typographer’s signature appears be- side that of the author in the colophon. The composition and presswork are excellent, as in most Rudge books, but the binding cloth is of poor quality and unpleasant texture, and
the gold decoration is badly stamped.
SATYRS AND WOMEN by Pierre Lous with drawings by Majeska. Designed by Robert S. Josephy and printed by Quinn and Boden. Illustrations by the Knudsen Process. (COVICI, FRIEDE. $15.00)
Tue Messrs. Covict AND FriepE are among the few publishers who bother to print their limited editions of erotica in a style commen- surate with their prices. The buyer of this type of book expects a large and gaudy vol- ume for his money, but he seldom gets a well-designed and well-printed one. This re- viewer is in a position to testify to the interest of this firm in good printing, and to the free- dom allowed the designers of their books. Satyrs and Women, a series of prose poems in M. Louys’s usual neurotic manner, is a tall narrow quarto set in a large italic type, with decorations throughout in blue. The fifteen drawings, beautifully reproduced in full col- or, are the best Madame Majeska has done. ROBERT S. JOSEPHY
In this department, to be conducted by Mr. Josephy, will appear reviews of illustrated and special editions, works on art, architec- ture and allied subjects, and books of typo- graphical interest.
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THE BOOKMAN ADVERTISER
NOTES ON NEW BOOKS—(continued)
Detective and Mystery
THE GREEN RIBBON éy Edgar Wallace
(DOUBLEDAY, DORAN. $1.00)
A passion for horse-racing and horses has prompted the author to write about Inspector Luke’s investigation of “Trigger’s Transactions” —a betting combine, in which one of the part- ners, a shady Dr. Blanter, steps outside the law and unwittingly does the Inspector a good turn. The pursuit of a South American heiress, a couple of murders, and a good description of race-track bookmaking in England are engag- ingly introduced in the course of Luke’s clean- up. The usual Wallace story with hidden caves and South American peons substituted for Chinese coolies and Limehouse doss-houses.
THE OWNER LIES DEAD dy Tyline Perry (COVICI-FRIEDE. $2.00)
IN THIs mystery of a haunted mine, the real owner is found dead at the bottom of the air shaft after a terrific fire has entombed many miners, and an old prophecy is fulfilled. The story of the owner’s strange death and of an ancient wrong that is at last set right, though too late, includes the early days of four young men, one of whom pieces together the mys- terious events that precede the death of his brother Tony in the mine disaster. A genuine mystery and romance of two people who are estranged by a force greater than their own love, but which later brings them together again.
THE YELLOW CRYSTAL dy
Anthony Wynne (wippincotT. $2.00)
Tue night before the sudden death of Sir John Oldmay he writes to his old friend Colonel Wickham of Scotland Yard that he is hunted by an unknown yet familiar enemy. Wickham and Dr. Hailey set out at once for Pykewood Hall to learn if possible whether or not a mur- derer’s impulse communicates itself in advance to his victim. In the course of events the family history is revealed and several motives for the crime appear. As in his past cases the Doctor
faces death to solve the mystery and, curiously enough, after a careful study of available facts, arrives at the exact truth. Conventional plot, but good deductive work.
MURDER ON THE BRIDGE dy Lynn Brock
(HARPERS. $2.00)
Wutze Colonel Gore and his friend’s wife, Mrs. “Pickles” Melhuish, are gaily dining in London, Dr. Melhuish, in answer to an urgent call, meets with a misadventure on the Westmouth Sus- pension Bridge that costs him his life. From the start the case is almost hopeless, and it looks as though Melhuish’s death will go un- avenged; but Gore, despite his unpopularity with the Yard, horns in and, finding a single and almost meaningless clue, is able to put the reluctant Inspector Lord onto his quarry. A bully good story; a feasible plot and well told.
THE SILVER KING MYSTERY dy Ian Greig (HoT. $2.00)
Muroer of the wealthy spinster, Amelia Piltar, on the links of the exclusive King’s Club near London, nearly costs her irresponsible nephew his life. However, unforeseen complications in the nature of blackmail and a keen dual per- sonality switch the police investigation in an- other direction. Inspector Swinton, set up by a “killing” in Dutch Ceylonese, does a much bet- ter job in tracking his victim and also gains courage in furthering his budding love affair.
THE MYSTERY OF THE HOUSE OF COM- MONS by Fielding Hope (ptav press. $2.00)
Wuerein the sinister influence of Communism is responsible for the killing of five members of Parliament, robbing a Secret Service agent, and abducting a young girl. Captain Stephen Chal- mers, who has brought back from India a list of malcontents for the Foreign Office, arrives at London in time to join forces with Scotland Yard in tracking down the master mind behind the plot to overthrow the Conservative Party. The credulity of the reader is somewhat taxed by the outcome, but the plot is ingenious and the action is swift.
eR STARE ELT ONT °
THE BOOKMAN ADVERTISER
THE OTHER BULLET by Nancy Barr Mavity
(DOUBLEDAY, DORAN. $2.00)
Perer Piper, the alert newspaper reporter who solved the Tule Marsh Murder last year, and as a result took unto himself a wife, has not lost his cunning on “scoops”, While Peter is on a vacation in the old California mining section, a man is murdered, and Peter starts on the trail of the criminal. The facts show that Don Mort- ison had two murderers. Through a maze of confusing clues and circumstances Peter plays a dual réle, that of detective and representative of the press, and finally marshals his facts to a successful culmination.
NUMBER NAUGHT by Seldon Truss (popp, MEAD. $2.00)
Tue machinations of a mysterious man, known to his associates and the police as Number Naught, are brought to a close by the persever- ance of Inspector Shane. Even Scotland Yard is involved in the sinister operations of the Nemo Club, and it is only by a lucky break, where a misstep causes the crooks to fall out, that the Inspector and his allies are saved from an ingenious device to blow them sky high. The usual schemes of blackmail, murder and mystery are employed in this desperate thriller.
THE MURDER OF CECILY THANE dy
H. Ashbrook (cowaRD-MCCANN. $1.50)
FortunaTety for District Attorney Tracy, under fire for his inability to satisfy the New York newspapers in the matter of catching criminals, his younger brother Spike takes a hand. He has the whole detective force up in arms and while they are busy trying to pin the murder of a jeweler’s wife on a gigolo he drags in the real culprit. Even though every estab- lished rule in the plotting of a detective story is broken, the book is cleverly written and is heartily recommended.
THE FRENCH POWDER MYSTERY by Ellery Queen (stokes. $2.00)
Inspector Queen and his son Ellery upset the traditions of the New York City police depart- ment in promptly solving the mystery surround- ing the murder of Mrs. French, wife of a Fifth
XIX
Avenue department-store magnate. They also break up a ring of dope peddlers into the bar- gain. The Queens have appeared before in The Roman Hat Mystery, a good tale published in 1929, and this new one is just as clever. Ellery has all of the perspicacity of a Philo Vance, but is infinitely more entertaining.
THE PICCADILLY GHOST éy Erle Spencer
(MACMILLAN. $2.00)
Two newspaper reporters of the London Cry pick up the threads of a suicide case at Vaux- hall Bridge and build up an astonishing murder mystery. The ghost in an art gallery, a missing South American millionaire and a counterfeit- ing plant all make good copy, and these two amateur sleuths outrival the activities of Scot- land Yard while on the trail of a “scoop”. Recommended as a sound detective story, with officialdom in the dim background.
THE LINK by Philip MacDonald (pvous.epay, DORAN. $1.00)
AN INTEREST in the real solution of crimes that are apparently too easily settled, leads Colonel Anthony Gethryn into strange places—where even stranger events take place. When the body of Lord Grenville is unceremoniously dropped into a public house, and Scotland Yard selects an innocent victim, Gethryn, aided by the local vet. at Samsford, gathers some seemingly ir- relevant facts that throw a monkey-wrench into the official machinery. But it turns out that the amateur criminologist is right. After studying the past history of the deceased and his neigh- bors some startling features are uncovered. The association of Colonel Anthony with a detective story carries the guarantee of a well-knit tale, with careful and interesting deductions and a properly suspended climax.
THE HOUSE OF STRANGE VICTIMS dy Bertram Atkey (APPLETON. $2.00)
Weattny beyond count, His Grace the Duke of Devizes, alias Prosper Fair, spends his time wandering about the countryside with his dog and donkey, closely watching people. He has many times helped the deserving and finds real happiness on his pilgrimages. Driven by the rain he stops for shelter one evening at a di-
XX
lapidated country house and learns a strange and sad story. Urged on by curiosity and the spirit of adventure, he returns to London to find his own cousin a victim of an extraordinary and similar swindle. Although he faces an un- known peril, he ventures into the house of strange victims and delivers from bondage nu- merous helpless souls. An eerie tale where right triumphs over a fiendish secret of science. You will like the unassuming Prosper despite the horror of his adventures.
THE MAN WHO WAS THERE dy N. A. Temple-Ellis (puTTon. $2.00)
A sMALL cottage at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight is the scene of a puzzling murder. Arbuthnot and King, criminal-hunters on a holiday, arrive simultaneously with the discov- ery of the body and plunge into the task of finding the culprit from the list of suspects. An innocent man is nearly hanged on damaging circumstantial evidence, but the keen and logi- cal mind of Arbuthnot, who sees the mystery through, saves him and enables the police to untangle the skein. All the elements of a good detective plot are embodied in this latest book of Mr. Temple-Ellis.
THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED dy Sax Rohmer (DOUBLEDAY, DORAN. $1.00)
Tue usual Sax Rohmer thriller, in which an American Secret Service man, a representative of the Paris Sireté and an English feature- writer become involved in the web of an abnor- mal man whose weird preparations for ending the world are all but complete. Their experi- ences in the haunted castle of Felsenweirs, guarded by soulless beings, and their escape offer genuine excitement with its attendant Nemoesque mechanical contrivances.
THE REDMAN CAVE MURDER by Elsa Barker (sgars. $2.00)
THE twenty-year-old secret of the Novercross family is revealed by the murder of a strange man in Redman Cave—the playground of their youth. Dexter Drake, international detective, and his assistant, Paul Howard, are again suc- cessful in ferreting out the truth and discover a long-lost treasure.
THE BOOKMAN ADVERTISER
THE AVENGING RAY by Austin ]. Small (DOUBLEDAY, DORAN. $1.00)
A new and deadly ray that will completely an- nihilate the world is invented by a mad sci- entist in the Pendine Caves of England. Strange lights coming across the moor disturb the peace and quiet of Sir Robert Harrigan at Deepvale Manor; he sends for Gerry Windemaine, and thus seals his own doom. Starting with an electrical phenomenon that nearly burns down the manor, Gerry and his friend Standy from Scotland Yard follow the activities of the mad Carlo Damian, and are almost killed at the weird and dramatic climax in the bowels of the earth. An engaging love interest completes this latest Small thriller.
THE GREEN JADE HAND by Harry Stephen
Keeler (puTTON. $2.00)
Tue Edgar Wallace of Chicago has penned an- other new thriller concerning the double-deal- ing of one Casimir Jech, a dishonest antique dealer, the wanderings of a tiny Chinese jade hand, and the fortunes of a young inventor. The main plot is interspersed with sub-plots that tend to confuse, but once all the characters are placed it is comparatively simple to tag along with them and learn how, by some amazing coincidences, they are all connected. Too in- volved for casual reading, but plenty of blood and thunder.
THE STRANGLEHOLD by Mrs. Baillie Rey-
nolds (DOUBLEDAY, DORAN. $1.00)
Caucnt in the toils of an unscrupulous gang whose activities ranged from blackmail to mur- der, lovely Kythe Deering, heiress to no small fortune, is forced to travel the Continent and finally back to England. Simon Marsden, un- able to find out why he was suddenly thrown over, smells a rat and puts an ex-Scotland Yard man on the scent. The subtleties of Edwin Dau- bray and the awkward attempts of Colonel Marsden to release Miss Deering from the shad- ow that clings to her carry the tale to a climax where the villain meets his proper deserts in a highly melodramatic manner. A caution to people who invite comparative strangers into the bosom of the family.
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(HOUGHTON MIFFLIN. $3.00)
FurtHer records of famous French cases in- vestigated by the author who was connected with the Paris Sdreté, first as pupil and later as
assistant to the world-famous criminologist, M.
Bertillon. As in Crimes of Violence and Re- venge and The Forgotten Clue Mr. Ashton- Wolfe deals with abnormal persons, those out- casts of society whose minds are warped and whose instincts are primitive. With none of the trappings and convenient arrangements upon which detective fiction is based, these factual cases are extremely dramatic and graphically described.
THE SQUARE MARK by Grace M. White and H. L. Deakin (putTon. $2.00)
Ovr of loyalty to the Head, who is summarily hauled off to jail, two school teachers in a fash- ionable English school for girls endeavor to solve the mystery of a man found dead in the formal garden. Together with John Tramayne, a newspaper reporter, and members of the local police they bring the murderer to justice, and in the course of events uncover a blackmail plot.
THE MYSTERY AT NEWTON FERRY dy
Laurence Meynell (Lippincott. $2.00)
A uivery tale wherein Michael Hastings, nov- elist, goes to Brenning Let to absorb fresh country air and write a book on Byzantine architecture. His peace and quiet are shortly upset by the attempted rape of Mrs. Dunning and the murder of Gerald Thorpe at Newton Ferry. From then on, what with speedy drives all over the countryside, a serious love affair with Jessica Thorpe, abductions and a dramatic round-up of murderers and counterfeiters at Hull, Hastings decides that London is a more comfortable place in which to live. Nothing new in the way of mystery, but a well-rounded story.
THE THIRTY-FIRST BULLFINCH dy Helen Reilly (DOUBLEDAY, DORAN. $1.00)
On an island off the bleak New England coast is the magnificent country home of John Bed- ford, who has amassed a huge fortune only to
THE BOOKMAN ADVERTISER THE THRILL OF EVIL by H. Ashton-Wolfe
XXI
find himself in his old age surrounded by those who seek his millions. While making a new will he is poisoned, and from then on the story races through chapter after chapter of horrors and suspense to a tragic climax. Mystery and death lurk behind every door of this luxurious home and even the most blood-thirsty will relish the strange adventures of Sheriff Tilden and his lawyer friend, Cliff Shaver.
THE TABLOID MURDERS by Clement Wood (MaAcauLay. $2.00)
Five brutal murders in Greater New York all emanating from one source. Mr. Wood tells his story in the language of the tabloids—with their sob-sister “leads” and misleading statements— opening his chapters with sensational captions of revelations and gruesome details. While the story itself is a little out of bounds and unbe- lievable, it is by the same token a nearer ap- proach to true tabloid form—and for a garbled and ridiculous version of an actual event (such as is greedily snapped up by the great Ameri- can public) it is perfectly priceless.
COLDSTONE by Patricia Wentworth (.p-
PINCOTT. $2.00)
Wirn the inheritance of Stonegate, Anthony Colstone receives a mysterious legend that has
been carefully guarded for generations. By.
means of a subterranean passage and the help of Susan, Anthony discovers a buried treasure and explains away the curse of Coldstone Ring. A light romance pleasantly combined with mystery and superstition.
MURDER THROUGH THE WINDOW dy
Francis Everton (Morrow. $2.00)
VALUABLE secret papers prepared by the British Physical Laboratory—in connection with the erosion of special alloy steels and high velocity gases—are stolen. George Annesley is sent to Germany to see if the papers have been taken there, but he finds nothing. The real mystery lies at the Priory near Cherry Hay on his own property. A couple of murders, a shell-shocked friend who persists in being ill-natured, and a satisfactory romance carry the story along to a tense climax, when the papers are located and a nefarious gang put out of business.
att amt onal nr
XXII
Miscellaneous
MATERIALS FOR THE LIFE OF SHAKES- PEARE compiled by Pierce Butler (university OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS. $2.00)
Makinc accessible in one compact, convenient and inexpensive volume the passages and docu- ments on which our knowledge of Shakespeare’s life is based is a work for which much gratitude is due Dr. Butler not only from students but from all intelligent readers. The arrangement, beginning with Rowe’s Life and concluding with the church records and inscriptions, is clear and logical; the compiler refrains from controversy, translates the Latin phrases and though he modernizes spelling and punctuation he does so with the express purpose of setting the reader at ease. Enough of the surrounding material is given to convey an idea of the whole and to enable one to feel the thrill of the research worker at coming upon the name he seeks.
STAMPS by Kent B. Stiles (Harpers. $3.00)
Tuts is a remarkably simple yet comprehensive outline of philately, a widespread hobby with both young people and adults. Starting with the fundamentals of stamp collecting, Mr. Stiles’s book embraces all the important information for beginners and furnishes invaluable data for adult collectors. As editor of the stamp depart- ments of The Youth’s Companion and The American Boy the author has received thou- sands of requests for information not easily ob- tainable, and this treatise, with its valuable glossary containing several thousand definitions and terms, provides the necessary practical knowledge.
FLASH D-13 dy Victor K. Kaledin (cowarp- MCCANN. $2.00)
NinE cases investigated by D-13, Assistant Chief of the Personal Court branch of the Russian Imperial Secret Service, are herein recorded with accuracy and authenticity. As one of the seven men selected by the Czar to protect the Crown, D-13’s knowledge of the Imperial family and the corrupt tendencies of the aristocracy led him to make superhuman efforts to show the Czar that Rasputin the “Saint” and members
THE BOOKMAN ADVERTISER
of his own family were conspiring with Ger- many, and trying to force his abdication. The picture shown of His Majesty, a weakling who signed away the lives of thousands and im- perilled his throne by senseless debauchery, is heartrending. Even more powerful than the Ochrana, the Russian Political Police, this group of seven men, one of whom was the Czar him- self, acted as a Special Tribunal in cases of conspiracy against the autocracy, but they were sadly handicapped in the execution of their work by the political forces that were constantly bending the Czar to their will. The author, who assisted D-13 and was known as L.X~11, has gathered together papers sent to him by his former superior and reveals the tragic inside events that lead up to the destruction of the once all-powerful Romanoff dynasty.
MICHAEL ANGELO AND OTHER SKETCHES by Dmitri Merezhkovsky (vvut- TON. $3.00)
From the outstanding incidents of Michael An- gelo’s life the author has built a short biogra- phy, which comprises two-thirds of this volume. The story of how Michael Angelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and his great love for the Marchioness Vittoria needs no adorn- ment and Mr. Merezhkovsky has wisely re- frained from adding any. It is a well-told tale, and two other stories of the same period fill out and add to the volume.
THE INVINCIBLE JEW dy Harford Powel,
]r. (BoBBs-MERRILL. $2.50)
Tue modern practice of meting out praise or blame to Paul of Tarsus by calling him the Rotary Organizer of Christianity is definitely challenged by this unusual chronicle. To Mr. Powel, the Apostle of the Gentiles was a cul- tured sensitive man who, better than all others, understood the teachings of Jesus and spread them with the tact and rhetoric of a trained philosopher. In spite of any preconceived ideas or variant interpretation of the facts that one may have, the book convinces, at least while one is reading it. The modern method of biog- raphy which borrows so freely from the novel is justified in a case such as this where actual source documents do not exist. Even the sensa-
THE BOOKMAN ADVERTISER XXIII
tional use of tabloid format for certain impor- tant events can be excused for the result ob- tained. It is a reverent and enthusiastic book which, in spite of its startling modernity, car- ries the message of Saint Augustine rather than that of Bruce Barton. Mr. Powel, who is one of “Copey’s young men”, is an excellent example of the author who, with culture and tradition behind him, can speak to his own generation in their own terms about the eternal verities without shaming himself or them.
WORD SHADOWS OF THE GREAT by Thomas F. Madigan (stokes. $5.00)
AutocraPH collecting, like philately, seems a harmless diversion until one meets an expert like Mr. Madigan. His book demonstrates the fiendish lure of signatures and the skill one must have, or develop, in order to collect them intelli- gently. The amount of biographical lore he casually presents about a disputed holograph is fascinating. The book is not only the most au- thoritative on the subject is but, also, seemingly incidentally, a mine of anecdotes and personali- ties. The general reader might well burrow into it even at the risk of being drawn into the maelstrom of collecting.
THE OUTLINE OF ART edited by Sir Wil- liam Orpen, K.B.E., R.A., Rd. (eutTNaM. $4.50)
Turee hundred reproductions of the work of great painters from the thirteenth century up to today illustrate this compendium for the layman. The text and the notes beneath the illustrations are too biographical, gossipy and emotional to justify the title, but the book is valuable and full of information for those who will never be called upon to handle a brush.
A FORD CROSSES SOVIET RUSSIA dy George S. Counts (sTRATFORD. $2.00)
In a rather haphazard account of two months in Soviet Russia, Professor Counts makes it clear that there are few good roads; garages are scarce; the political police are helpful; toilet and bath facilities are almost non-existent; the back- wardness of the peasantry is appalling; and the vastness of the Five-Year Plan and the effec- tiveness with which it is being put into opera- tion fill him with admiration.
LOST TREASURE dy A. Hyatt Verrill (ar- PLETON. $3.00)
Tue Spanish Main, with its rich background of galleons, pirates and freebooters, has lured countless expeditions to salvage treasures at the bottom of the sea. Ship after ship, either sunk by pirates or victim of foul weather, has gone to the bottom, richly laden with pieces of eight and vast fortunes in bullion and art treasures being taken from the Western hemisphere to Spain and to England. Aside from these sunken treasures Mr. Verrill describes pirate hoards, sunken cities and the Spanish gold expeditions of Cortez and Pizarro in Mexico and Peru. From the inevitable glamorous tales of fiction and legend that surround hidden treasures Mr. Verrill has painstakingly separated the wheat from the chaff and brings to us a conservative and authentic resumé gleaned from records and personal research that loses none of its lure in factual description.
SKYWAYS by General William Mitchell (ie- PINCOTT. $3.00)
Ho.pinc this book in one hand and clutching the joy-stick with the other, the modern young Icarus might possibly go up and certainly could come down. General Mitchell, who has been connected with aeronautics from their begin- ning, has written a complete, yet not too tech- nical, book on flying in all its phases. While knowing thoroughly the inadequacy and dan- gers of planes to-day, the General believes that they will be the greatest force in war and peace in the future. His lucid account of the amazing feats now possible is convincing and his experi- ence as former Commander of the Air Forces gives his book the weight of authority. The reader who is swamped in his efforts to keep abreast with the times will find that this handy volume brings him up to yesterday’s headlines.
SKIPPY AND OTHER HUMOR by Percy L. Crosby (GREENBERG. $2.50)
Ir you have ever met Skippy you will want this book—and if you haven’t met him—get the book. And when you have it you'll not stop turning the pages until you come to the end, for Skippy is as delightfully appealing and hu- morous as ever—more so, if possible.
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THE BOOK MART
HESE midsummer days which have forced the department stores to resort to “sales” of all kinds in order that
business might go on have been “bargain days” for the book collectors. The last auction season, with its early ending, pointed the way to the booksellers, who have been issuing catalogues with all sorts of prices, the differ- ences among dealers being as great as those which were noted in the auction rooms. Whether the volume of sales fell off like that at the auctions only the dealers can tell. Last season’s sales of books and autographs at the American Art-Anderson Galleries totalled $653,006.85, which is the lowest for any year since the World War. Some new records were made, it is true, especially in the field of first editions of American authors, but the average for the class of material of- ferred was lower than for many seasons. Nearly every sale might be referred to, in the parlance of the rare book dealers, as “spotty”. The result was that the dealers, into whose hands many of these works had gone, were at something of a loss as to valuation, and prices in catalogues were as “spotty” as the sales. There are signs, however, of re- turning stability in the rare book market. Some of the leading dealers have consistently refused to lower prices of certain rare first editions of modern authors which seemed to have gone out of fashion and have marked their books regardless of anything except what they deemed intrinsic value. Gals- worthy was one of the principal sufferers by the season’s slump and prices of the first (limited) edition of The Forsyte Saga ranged from three hundred and ten to six hundred dollars. Here is a case where rarity makes value; if the first trade edition is worth one hundred dollars, the limited edition ought to be worth at least six times that.
xxiv
When the ordinary first editions of a living author which were printed in editions of five thousand copies or more sell for two or three hundred dollars, it indicates that desire has outrun judgment among some collectors. Those books which were produced in small editions, and which fell flat upon their first appearance, like Stephen Crane’s Maggie, for example, have rarity to justify their high prices, for there are not enough copies to go around. Of course the literary content of the book is its main factor of value and condi- tion also cuts much figure in determining prices. But apart from these considerations the law of supply and demand operates, or at least should operate, although at present there is a tendency to pay ridiculous prices for almost any old first edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin and many other works which were issued in large first editions. Probably a chastened buying public will straighten this matter out before the end of another auc- tion season.
The sales of the books by A. Edward New- ton last season emphasized the importance of rarity. The Amenities of Book Collecting, which brought Mr. Newton into the literary limelight, was issued in an edition of 4,000 copies, but its literary content was known through the appearance of the papers in the Atlantic Monthly, and a large part of the edition went into public or circulating libraries where the copies were soon read to death, which accounts for its now being in the fifth edition and for the price of one hundred and forty-five dollars paid for a presentation copy of this five-dollar book last season. But the little Christmas books issued by Mr. Newton brought anywhere from twenty to fifty-seven and a half dollars at the same sale. While not so important in
THE BOOKMAN ADVERTISER
THE BOOK MART
contents as The Amenities they are much | scarcer, and the demand for them is still growing.
The English book auction season continued | for more than two months after ours had | closed, and some important sales were held | in June. The most notable feature of the sale at Sotheby’s, June 16 to 19, was the dis- | persal of the Goldsmith collection formed | by Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Isham of Glen Cove, Long Island. The Isham collection of Goldsmith’s work has long been known to collectors. The prices showed that Colonel Isham was wise in not putting the collec- | tion into the American auction room the | past season. There were no less than forty- five editions of The Vicar of Wakefield be- ginning with the H. V. Jones copy of the Salisbury edition of 1766. This is by no | means, however, the only sale in London of material owned by Americans. Considerable | Americana was shipped to England at the end of the season in this country, to be sold | at Sotheby’s. Curiously enough, some of it
was bought back by American dealers and |
will come again to this country.
One of the most interesting and important |
acquisitions of the year by an American dealer was the purchase by Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach of one of the few existing codices
of contemporary accounts of the discovery of
America. Dr. Rosenbach brought home a volume which contained an account of Columbus’s voyages and discoveries as related to a friend, who wrote it all down for pos- terity. The manuscript is to be translated
20
| 66 Fifth Ave. at 12th St.
from the Spanish, edited and published. It |
contains the information that Columbus was a native of Milan, and that at one time he was a bookseller.
NEW YORK, N. Y.
CASH DISCOUNT Oo DURING AUGUST
ON CUR ENTIRE STOCK OF OLD, RARE AND NEW BOOKS ON ALL SUBJECTS
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Bargain list sent on request
GOTHAM BOOK MART, 51 W. 47th St., New York, N. Y.
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pete. Sporting Pirst Standard Editions
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NE of the finest collections of
books and prints in America, supplemented by weekly importations of choice items. Prices guaranteed as low as any other shop. Every urchase guaranteed satisfactory. De- eoal datings if desired. talogs on request.
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NEW YORK, N. Y.
BOOKS ON STRANGE SUBJECTS For Gifts
Occultism, Astrology, Mysticism, Theosophy; Ma- sonic Books, Bibles; Masonic and O.E.S. Novelties; Leather Goods; Jewelry. Visit our store; free read- ing room. Send for catalogs of items interesfing you. MACOY Publishing & Masonic Supply Co. 35 West 32nd St. (Est. 1849) New York
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REDDING MASONIC SUPPLY CO. 9 West 23rd Street Masonic Publishers New York, N. Y.
BOSTON, MASS.
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SCHOENHOF BOOK CO. 387 Washington Street Boston, Mass
SPRINGFIELD, MASS.
Any Book of Any Publisher PROMPT CAREFUL SERVICE! THE H. R. HUNTTING COMPANY (Library Specialists) SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
FARMINGTON, CONN.
OLD BOOKS—First editions, Eighteenth Cen- tury authors in contemporary bindings, Ameri- cana. Colored plate books. Catalogues issued. FARMINGTON BOOK SHOP, Farmington. Conn.
America has reason to rejoice that by an act of Congress the Library of Congress has been enabled to hold up its head along with the British Museum and the Bibliothéque Na-
| tionale as the possessor of one of the three
existing perfect copies of the Gutenberg Bible on vellum. The bill introduced in Congress by Representative Ross A. Collins of Missis- sippi, to appropriate $1,500,000 for the collec- tion of incunabula brought to this country | by Dr. Otto H. F. Vollbehr of Berlin, had the remarkable experience of being passed without debate, under suspension of the rules, by both houses of Congress. It promptly re-
| ceived the signature of President Hoover,
who himself is the translator from the Latin of a piece of incunabula, De Re Metallica. Representative Ross proudly points to this as showing the world that the American Con- gress is not wholly concerned with material | things, but is willing to advance the cause | of scholarship. What opposition there was to the bill was subterranean; the enthusiasm with which the Collins measure was endorsed by librarians, scholars and book collectors,
backed also by favoring editorials in more | than seventy newspapers, made it easy for | its friends to vote for it.
That the purchase of the Vollbehr collec- tion will do much to make Washington a world-center of scholarship is beyond ques- tion, but in some respects equally important is the securing, by gift, of the unequalled | Folger collection of Shakespeareana, which is | to be housed in a building to be erected for it adjoining the Library of Congress. The | richness of the Folger collection, which like
the Vollbehr collection, contains a great many books that are unique, make it imperative | for the Shakespearean student to visit Wash- ington at some period of his researches.
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THE BOOKMAN ADVERTISER XXVII
THE BOOK MART
Reprints and Anthologies
Miscellaneous
Everyman’s Library (Dutton. $.90 each.) Moliére’s Comedies, Two volumes, in the excellent eighteenth-century translation of Baker and Miller; introduction by F. C.
Green.
Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope; two volumes. Introduction by Hugh Walpole.
Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost; Carmen by Prosper Mérimée. Introduction by Philip Henderson.
Leigh Hunt’s Essays. Selections; with an introduction by J. B. Priestley.
American Short Stories of the Nineteenth Century edited by John Cournos. Poe and Irving to O. Henry and R. H. Davis, with historical introduction emphasizing the journalistic background.
The State of the Prisons by John Howard. Introduction by Kenneth Ruck; text of third edition (1784) abridged by omis- sion of some detailed documentation.
Capital by Karl Marx. Translation by Eden and Cedar Paul; introduction by G. D. H. Cole; two volumes.
Bevis by Richard Jefferies. Introduction by Guy Pocock. A boy’s life of adventures in English woods and waters.
Shorter Novels, Jacobean and Restoration. Introduction by Philip Henderson. Eman- uel Ford, Aphra Behn, Henry Neville,
Congreve.
Heimskringla: Sagas of the Norse Kings, compiled by Snorre Sturlason. Transla- tion of Dr. Samuel Laing (1844); intro- duction and notes by John Beveridge.
CHICAGO, ILL.
The Walden Book Shop 546 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago
issues catalogues and announcements of modern first editions with especial emphasis on Hardy, Barrie Galsworthy, Coppard, Kipling, Stephens, Tomlinson, Wells and others less well-known but of literary merit.
FOREIGN BOOKSELLERS
That Book You Want! Ws. . »2!4__ 2.000.000
* vols.; new, secondhand, out-of-print, every conceivable subject. Also Rare Books and Sets of Authors. Books on approval. Outline requirements and interests; catalogues free (20 issued).
FO " Charing Cross Road, London, England
THE FRANK HOLLINGS BOOKSHOP. Rare and Valuable Books for the Collector and Connoisseur. Presentation
‘copies; Association items; Autograph letters; Manuscripts;
Private Presses; Old colour plate books; Finely printed an choicely bound books. 7 Great Turnstile, High Holborn, London, England. Catalogue free on application.
Catalogues Free FINE R. Fletcher, Ltd.
RARE 23 New Oxford St. BOOKS London, W C 1
England
A DIRECTORY or Sica coe
the advertising of book shops
all thru the country . . . FOR YOUR vr book shops specializing in rare BOOK WANTS fcrirrent lterature in the ult modern
in books in foreign languages and on specialized subjects . .
books for the collector, the reader, the student, the child .. . books for beauty, for service —for gifts.
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XXVIII
THE BOOKMAN ADVERTISER
LITERARY AGENTS AND WRITERS AIDS
F. M. HOLLY
AUTHORS’ REPRESENTATIVE 156 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
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i Particulars of Dr. Esenwein’s famous forty-lesson course in writing and marketing of the Short-Story and sample copy of THE WRITER’S MONTHLY free. Write today.
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unusual ‘“‘s-point’’ service for authors. 1, Every ms. re- viewed free. a, Detailed analysis of salable mss. at actual handling cost. 3, Mss. placed on commission basis. 4, Max- imum rates obtained. 5, Prompt payments assured. Send mss. or inquiries to
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Club members WRITERS, We assist in 9 preparing special! articles, papers, speeches, debates. Expert po #1 K service suited to your requirements, highly endorsed. Revision of manu-
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Books, short stories, articles and verse criticized and marketed ; special department for plays and motion pictures. THE WRITERS’ WORKSHOP, INC.,
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k toot Places to Sell Manuscripts, $2. 50. Boo S wWriter’s Book, $2.50. How to write a Short Story, 65c. What Editors Want, asc. Cata-
for logue 30 others. Also personal service in criti- Writers cism of manuscripts and advice as to markets. Correspondence invited. *JAMES KNAPP REEVE
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1, havea people are astonished when they hear, for the first time, that, in belonging to the Book-of-the- Month Club, all one obligates oneself to do is to take a minimum of only four books a year. Any four books! Most subscribers, of course, take many more, but one does not have to, in order to obtain the many undoubt-
ed conveniences this system provides. What are these conveniences? Instead of relying for information about the new books upon hearsay and adver- tising, you have a group of five dis- tinguished critics, in whose disinter- estedness book-readers can have con- fidence, who cull out the new books which they believe intelligent book-
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readers will not care to miss. These critics are Dorothy Canfield, Heywood Broun, Christopher Morley e William Allen White ‘ and Henry ,Seidel Canby. Assisting them on a foreign advisory Committee, each for his own country, are H. G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett,in England; André Maurois, in France; Thomas Mann and Arthur Schnitzler in Ger- many and Austria; and Sigrid Undset in Scandinavia.
het gar This Editorial Board each month chooses what it considers the “book- of-the-month”, and also from fifteen to twenty-five other new books. But before any member receives the “book- of-the-month”, he receives an advance report, written by one of these judges, describing the kind of book it is. If as a member you decide you want it, you let it come to you. If not, perhaps you decide you want one of the alter- nate recommended books, about which also you receive carefully written ad- vance reports. If none of the books reported upon appeal to you, you take none at all.
In short, you keep fully, disinter- estedly informed about the impor- tant new books; and at the same time the system insures that you really get, without fail, the particular new books you are anxious to read, instead of missing them, which now happens so frequently. And what do these con- veniences cost you? Nothing! You pay only for the books you decide to take,
**BOOK-OF-THE. | ana, MONTH” { see other side }
if you wish, you may take as few as four a year, out of 200 to 25 reported upon.
7 7 7 It is a fact of real pertinence to book- readers, that over 100,000 of the most perspicacious readers in the country (they could not be more so, judging from the books they take) now use these conveniences; and that not a single one was induced to subscribe by a salesman, but did so after simply learning the facts, by mail, about what it does for readers.
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For a short time past (to induce prompt action on the part of people who, we know, have intended to join and have simply neglected to) we have been offering the “first book free”’ to new subscribers. This, accord- ingly, is a particularly opportune time to get the facts. Surely, within the next twelve months, there will be at least four new books published which you will be very anxious not to miss. Why not, through this system, make sure of getting them; at the same time get the many obvious conveniences the Book- of-the-Month Club system provides; and, in addition, receive free the cur- rent book-of-the-month, or any other book you want costing not more than 3.00.
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ur service.
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Christopher Morley
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William Allen White
Henry Seidel Canby Chairman
Fillin andmail — before you forget— NO STAMP NEEDED
In the Haddon Book Bindery fifteen thousand completed volumes are pro- duced each day. This giant machine trims a steady stream of sewed books with amazing speed and accuracy.
PRECISION
The precision of practical craftsmen whose vision extends beyond their own small task—to the completed book: That is the standard set by The Haddon Craftsmen. Artist, photo- engraver, compositor, electrotyper, printer, book and magazine binder are moulded here into a harmonious organization;toserve modern business in a modern way; to eliminate the worry, waste and expense of divided responsibility in book production.
5 She Haddo
tecoaerosateno New York: 393 Seventh Avenue ti) Complete Plant: Camden, New Jersey
Witty...
Malicious... Ruthless
Aldous Huxley
... blows out four brief candles!... including Herbert Claxton, with his “inward art’ and his red beard... Chawdron who mistook a taran- tula for a kitten ... a certain novel- ist who didn’t run away from an infatuation in time.
ANDLES
Here is fiction as brilliant as
POINT COUNTER POINT
$2.50 Doubleday, Doran
GREAT SEA STORIES TA VAAAVULONS
The first anthology of great sale water stories ..- immortal tales of all ages, from Homer to Masefield and McFee. Edited by
H. M. TOMLINSON
. author of Gallions Reach. Over eleven hundred pages! $5.00. Coming April 23.
Doubleday, Doran